Hello friends, I missed you all and I hope you missed me as well. I hope you are enjoying all the updates on our projects this semester.
I wish I was working at a radio station so that I could give you an update every morning, you know just to keep you on track with what’s going on in studio V.
I want you to put your seat belt on though because we are going to fly through what’s been happening this week.
First of all, I want to give you a quick head up about where we are in terms of design and site study, and also tell you a little about our direction in this project.
Of course, the Greenway is a long stretch, as highlighted by Ryan and Jeremy, we are on a pretty narrow path at this moment, but we are putting in the work and making sure we understand the cores of our project as well as the client’s and the community’s needs.
Anyway, let me tell you what’s going with all the tumult in studio V. After meeting with the clients last Friday, January 31, we enjoyed our weekends, relaxed, and took a deep breath ( I watched the Superbowl and enjoyed that halftime show with the whole crew and it was fun spending quality time with these guys).
On Monday, we gathered and decided to get back to our notes, and after a thorough and informative discussion and a great conversation with the man of the house, aka Prof Pastre, we tried to narrow our focus on two important locations along the Greenway.
There are locations that we really liked and others that we were skeptical about but we explored every one of them because they had potentials. Nevertheless, we had to come out with more realistic ideas and that meant listening to the client and the community, and understanding each location’s history, surroundings, demographics, and culture.
We ended up choosing two interesting sites along the Greenway, and since we are a group of 12 students this semester, we decided to split up and put together two teams of 6 students for each of the two sites.
The first site is located close to the Tennis Center on Farmfield, and the second one is between Coburg Road and Timmerman Dr. Both locations do offer great opportunities for intervention but are yet challenging to approach design-wise.
On Tuesday of this week, tracing papers and markers led the talk, computers took a break and individuals sketches were made in order to both assert and analyze each location with more depth. It was a great opportunity to layout maps, do markups, think about ideas, apply precedents studies, and understand site conditions, potential, challenges, and of course safety measures.
On Wednesday, it was time to pin-up and come up together as a group. Each group of six presented their research and findings as well as potential intervention ideas for each of the two chosen locations.
Did we draw too much, do we have a good understanding of the sites and their potentials, limitations, and histories? Those were some important questions that came up, and we thought it best to visit each location and do a study, and document, one more time, yes, one more time.
Luckily, those of us working on the location between Coburg Road and Timmerman Dr. had the chance to meet Donna Jacobs on Wednesday afternoon, and she was kind to give us an hour of her time. She related stories and gave us a brief but thorough and detailed history of the place as well as the community living around, and she also helped us understand how to better approach the project design-wise ( could be landscape-based, or more architectural, we don’t know yet because we still have to get back to our tracing papers and sketch more). It was a fruitful and helpful meeting that we were grateful for. After the meeting, we took pictures, made measurements, and watched some of the Greenway’s users running or biking on the 8 feet asphalt path.
The other group working on the Farmfield also had an opportunity to visit the site they are currently working on and document as much as they could. That’s it for now.
More updates to come!!!
Now let’s take a layover for a minute, but don’t put your seat belt down just yet because the next pilot ( aka Luke aka the “cowboy of studio V”) is going to follow up through our process, and as you know, it is an interesting journey that we have embarked on, and each step we take, and each decision we make as a team, is going to reflect the community’s need in the end as well as the core values of this studio.
And one last thing, …please trust the process…..
Cheers!!!!