Yesterday, January 31st, the class presented our individual designs to our clients Enough Pie and the First African Evangelical Christian Church and also a representative from Remark, the landscape architects working on the project. At the conclusion of our presentations we went through and collectively pointed out the pros and cons of each individual project. We want to use these from each project to come up with one final design that encompasses different aspects from several projects.
Some of the cons that were pointed out were the materials chosen may not be feasible, could be too expensive as an upfront cost, could be too expensive and labor intensive to maintain years from now, and might not hold up as the clients would like. Since this design is being built for the use of children we have to keep in mind that children will most likely climb and play on anything that they are able to. A couple of the individual designs created places where they children may be enticed to climb on which they could possibly fall and get hurt creating a liability that our clients may prefer to eliminate before it happens. The cons are good to look at at the individual level so we can go ahead and make sure that they do not appear in our final design.
On the other hand, there were many aspects that our clients loved about several of the designs. One in particular stood out a lot because of the seating and storage the design created. Enough Pie really liked it because the seats were moveable which would allow the space to be changed upon their needs and how it invited the kids to come in and play but was also safe enough where if they were to fall they would not get hurt. Another design they liked was one that was closer to the ground and created a more enclosed space rather than open and airy. They liked this because kids seem to enjoy some enclosed spaces and it was also help keep the kids in the area instead of out roaming around.
After the conclusion of our presentations and discussions we came back together as a class and determined the design must include the following:
- durability
- inexpensive building materials
- seating (preferably moveable/changeable)
- storage
- a stage or somewhere for the storyteller to stand
- the use of organic shapes
- kid friendly
- have an enclosed, intimate feeling
We also decided that instead of doing something risky and more of a sculpture type design we want to stick with a design that will get the job done, last for a long time but also look high quality and artistic.
Our nexts steps will be to put all of this together and come up with one final design that we will work on and progress with.