Surveying The Site

After meeting with city of Charleston representatives, we split ourselves into groups on Friday to divide a handful of tasks amongst ourselves. Some of our classmates studied the history of Steven Washington Park, others studied the community demographics, and others focused on precedent studies. Myself and two others tasked ourselves with measuring everything on the [...]

Gearing up at Stephen Washington Park

Studio has just begun for the semester and this past week we have been diving into site research! On Tuesday, we visited our project site, Stephen Washington Park, where we met with a Department of Parks representative. He shared a brief history of the Park and the Honey Hill community. Since then, we've continued our [...]

Final Push

This past week has been a grind, as we all make a final push in all of our classes. History essays, mappings, internship papers and community 1:1 projects have been the priority of our nights, while building the pavilion at Plymouth Park has been our focus during the days. I was not personally on site [...]

Put a Roof On It

As of yesterday, all of our purlins have been attached onto our structure, and now we wait for the cedar shake shingles to arrive! As a crew continued to work on setting the purlins, Anna and I headed over to Old Towne Creek with David to work some finishing touches with stain on the donor [...]

Fabrication Almost Done!

Today, the studio made major progress. We’ve officially finished up most of the remaining shop work! The columns, truss, cross bracing, and rafters are all complete, and over half of the purlins have been sanded and stained. We even loaded up the first truckload of pieces to head to the site. All left to do [...]

Prepping for Construction

Today we split into two groups. Half of the group stayed back in the shop. This group made solid progress, managing to finish the final truss, cut and prime all the rafters, and sand all the perlins to be ready for staining. Most of the pieces are ready to be brought out to Plymouth park [...]

Completion of the Old Towne Creek Donor Wall

After about seven weeks of planning, designing, and building, we’re finally close to finished on the Old Towne Creek Donor Wall and it has been a complete success so far all things considered. What started as a rough planning process working through the best way to fabricate the pieces and producing a material count, has [...]

Half-Scale Model Complete & Shop Drawings Underway

This week, studio made significant progress on the Plymouth Park pavilion. Today, we completed the half-scale model of the truss system, letting us do a test run of construction to learn from and better understand how the structure comes together. This not only helped us refine our construction process, but also prepared us for the [...]

Enjoying the Charleston Sun

The studio prioritized time outdoors this weekend... at the worksite! Working Friday afternoon and all day Saturday, our team spent many hours on site this weekend building the Old Towne Creek Donor Wall. On Sunday, some students went back to the site to finish the rafters and purlins while three of us went to the [...]

Building the Donor Wall

Today is an exciting day for Studio V! We've finished our work in the shop constructing all of the pieces for the Old Towne Creek Donor Wall, and today we start building on site. The columns were the last pieces for us to finish up, and so after we bring them out onto site we'll [...]