Can I speak to your manager?

This week I have been wrapping up some initial designs with my nonprofit, Amor Healing Kitchen. Amor recently moved to the old Kaminskys location in West Ashley. Here they have gotten more foot traffic and recognition from the surrounding neighborhoods who are curious about what they do. At this location, there is a side and [...]

Studio with a Side of Oysters

Today we reconvened to discuss how we adapted our group designs to the site plan we chose. Each group came prepared with either a digital model, section sketches, or detail sketches. We all presented our ideas to the group and compared our ideas between the different options. After noting which aspects were more successful than [...]

Spring Break loading….. 50%

T-minus 3 days till Spring break! With the break being right around the corner we are all in full grind, as we have started schematic design. This will lead into our final design. Currently, we have broken into 3 groups of 5. Each group worked with each other Monday and came back together at the [...]

Come Together

Friday was a huge success, and lots of great comments and feedback were provided. Synthesizing the five unique projects will be the task of the week. By scrutinizing the strengths and weaknesses of each project, we now know what to integrate into the next phase of design, and what NOT to integrate. It's essential that [...]

Final Countdown

What a week! This past Friday we had the opportunity to present to the Parks Conservancy, Green Heart, Meeting Street Academy (MSA), and the City our small group designs. Many beautiful ideas were presented to them and everyone in attendance had such positive things to say about each project that it's definitely going to be [...]

Knee Deep in the Community

Today marks the day of our group design review with Greenheart, the Parks Conservancy, and the City of Charleston for a community garden at Singleton Park. The studio has been diligently working on models and drawings all week in groups of three to present five different schemes to these partners. It’s safe to say that [...]

Model Mania(cs)

Today was another day progressing our designs for our next meeting with our stakeholders, but much of what was started on today were physical models. Physical models are key tools in quickly communicating a design idea to others - sometimes in a simplicity that can't be captured by a computer program. As has been done [...]

Wood you, could you, build a cabinet?

A lunch and learn is like an adult field trip. I visited Low Country Case & Millwork with coworkers from CEMS and I was truly amazed. Before entering the building we were greeted by an alligator sunbathing by the pond which I thought was the warmest welcome. LCCM recently moved into a brand new 52,000 [...]

Break-ing for Wonder

As we look forward to presenting our small group designs on Friday, our studio is in full on production mode. Digital models are being brought to a level of structural and material realism and drawings are being diagrammed to communicate clear program and purpose. Pairing with our teams' digital and drawn representations, we're building physical [...]

Making the Most Before Midterms

Midterms are fast approaching and we are gearing up for our small group design presentations! Everyone's been working very hard leading up to this Friday where we will present our small group iterations to Green Heart and Meeting St Academy to receive feedback. Before we all set into our final stretch for the presentations, we [...]