After a successful site visit last week and with our first full week of classes beginning today, Studio V is off to a good start! This week we are doing some background research and analysis on our site and future project in preparation for our first review this Friday. Some of the topics that we are looking to cover during our presentation to the Charleston Park Conservancy include:
- A brief history on the Wagener Terrace Community and surrounding area
- Demographic statistics on the local community and any major shifts overtime
- Climate conditions
- Current site conditions
- Basic information about the requirements and needs of a community garden
- Precedent studies on community gardens, shading structures, interesting material, construction and joinery techniques, public seating, and storage sheds
- Some site proposals for our project at Corrine Jones Park based on the research gathered
Having a strong background in these various topics is critical in order to gain a deeper understanding of the task at hand and in order to maximize design potential and opportunities for this project. This information will also come in handy as we begin to develop our individual designs for the community pavilion come next week. So in order to tackle these research topics, we have divided ourselves into small groups and divvied up the tasks. My group is in charge of looking into different precedents from which we can draw inspiration and ideas from to use in our own designs later on. This will also help us get a better feel for what the Park Conservancy is looking for as to what they dislike and would like to see implemented in their new community pavilion.
We will be doing a design charrette on Wednesday during class to begin brainstorming and bouncing around ideas for some site options that we will be presenting to the client this Friday as well. So stayed tuned to see what ideas come of that and what else we are digging up doing our research!