Moving Forward

Mondays are quiet in the studio, as everyone meets with their nonprofits for the Community 1:1 course. There isn’t much to report on that, BUT if you have recommendations for architecture-related things to do in Charleston, please let me know! I’m partnering with the South Carolina Architectural Foundation to create a brochure / informal walking [...]

Site Plan Iterations + Snow

Post first meeting with the council from Dolphin Architects, the Sea Islands Conservancy and the Gullah Geechee Chamber of Commerce representative Cory, we started site plan iterations for where the best locations for our stands would be. Some considerations driving these plans being visibility from the street/entrance, incorporation into nature and accessibility. With 3-5 iterations per [...]

Donuts and Adobe

Starting the afternoon with Duck Donuts (shout out Malu and her firm Coast Architects) and a short standup, we all started work on getting the finishing touches of our research and precedent presentation together. Site analysis, local history, and precedent studies are all deep in research for a comprehensive display to the Conservancy of the [...]

Trust the Process

With spring cleaning complete and the initial site visit for this semester's sweetgrass stand project concluded, students now pivot to compiling project information, research, and precedent studies for their upcoming presentation on Wednesday. Both the architecture students and historic preservation students are currently collaborating to make this happen. All hands on deck! While everybody is [...]

Final Review!

The studio held our final review for the semester today, gathering faculty, staff, students, and community members under our pavilion. Even though the structure isn’t fully complete, it was exciting to share the project and see the enthusiasm the community and city had for it. The review felt less like a critique and more like [...]

Preparing For The Grand Opening!

For the past little while the class has been on site, rushing to get everything built for Wednesday. Over the weekend, all the furniture was welded, grinded, and painted. Additionally, the central columns were placed, and the central beams were installed. Today, we put up the outer columns, which was followed by the outer beams [...]

Measure Twice, Cut Once

This weekend, the girls and guys split up to tackle both the LVL beams and the rebar for the concrete piers. The girls began by dimensioning the LVLs and marking the screw pattern, a task that took much longer than expected on Friday. On Saturday and Sunday, we focused on screwing the LVLs together, adding [...]

Breaking Ground!

We officially broke ground on site! With the concrete formwork nearly complete and rebar on its way, the next week will be dedicated to bending rebar and preparing the site for the slab pour and concrete footers. The images show us digging out the footers for the structural spine of the project and digging to [...]