But Can We Build It

Today can make or break some of our team concepts. We are going to be introducing some ideas for the a new park in the Ardmore Community with Jason Kronsberg, the Director of Parks for the City of Charleston. It's important to determine whether each of our group's ideas fit the requirements of the city [...]

Discussion Leads to Development

On Monday, all the students came to studio with their own individual ideas for what could be the future of our site. Each had been assigned one of three locations described in the previous blog post. Our professor David Pastre came to each student individually and listened to them describe their various ideas in detail [...]

Throwing Together a Roof

Once the posts and beams for the roof were put into place, you could have blinked and missed all of the rafters going up. Call it efficiency, call it hard work, call it being crazy running off nothing but sweat. Working as a team, We cut each rafter at the angles they needed to be [...]

Did someone say baluster?

After many, many hours of testing angle cuts, baluster heights, and fits, the railings are finally done! When we initially started on the balusters, progress was slow as we worked to figure out a system to be as efficient as possible with the process. By the end, we were a well-oiled machine, with different people [...]

The Gang Prefabs a Railing Frame

As the past posts have displayed, up to this point, every part of the project had been built on site. But once we reached the point of building the railings, we saw an opportunity to use the shop to create more precise cuts that would make the railing frames fit together better. What made the [...]

Concrete Paths are Hard

Before we could actually pour the concrete pads and path for the bridge, we had to dig out the earth for it. After a long day of shovelling dirt, dirt, and more dirt for the concrete pads that would be at the small bridge and one side of the main bridge, we decided that borrowing [...]

The Roof is on Fire (and Deep Fried)

As we move closer to the placing of the piers, the class is making final preparations to get started on construction next week. A group consisting of Michaela, Brittany, Baker, and John (myself) have been working to knock out the remaining details, which consist of the roof connections and the handrails. The goal is to [...]

On the Seventh day, they rested

After a successful meeting with the Charleston Parks Conservancy, we were blessed with a Thursday off. In preparation for our meeting with the Structural Engineer on Monday, we have listed out a series of tasks to complete over the weekend, ranging from creating construction documentation templates to researching codes that relate to our project. As [...]

Site = Chosen

Using feedback from last Wednesday's community meeting, we have come to the decision to build on the Mulberry Pond site located next to the bikeway. The site features a couple of opportunities for bridges to be built. The next phase of the project will include coming up with design sketches and choosing which side of [...]

Zoom University

Thanks to COVID-19 protocols at the Cigar Factory, the last few classes have been entirely online. This has actually led to some beneficial testing of the online software known as InVision. This website is what the class intends to use for the community conversation and in the past few days, we have all become more [...]