Surprise!

The studio got a last-minute surprise this week... due to scheduling issues, the review has been moved to Wednesday! This is a welcome change, as it has allowed us to spend more time on details such as furniture systems, roof material selection, and ground plane decisions. It has been a long week and many hours [...]

A Fast Start To February

In the Community Build studio, the beginning of February has been eventful. We are currently moving towards a February 18th deadline as we work to synthesize our many ideas and narrow down our final group design to be proposed to the city. Most of the studio met yesterday to compare sketches and study models, then [...]

Forging Brilliance – Where Grit Meets Design

In the heart of Charleston's Old Towne Creek Park, 10 of us are crafting more than just a pavilion—we're shaping a community. This project, part of Clemson's Community Build Program, began with individual designs that evolved into collaborative concepts presented to the Parks Department, receiving great feedback both times. After rigorous sessions, we finally settled [...]

Mulberry Pond Park Expansion

Happy Leap Day! This semester, I am partnering with the Charleston Parks Conservancy to assist with the future expansion of Mulberry Pond Park. The 5-acre site in West Ashley is home to two ponds on either side of Mulberry Street as well as three prior Clemson Architecture + Community Build projects: Spring 2021–Mulberry Pond Crossing, [...]

Giving the Handrails a Facelift

Our second project for "Spring Cleaning" is at Forrest Park where we tackled some small repairs on the bridge. The bridge was completed in the Fall of 2020 that utilized tensegrity as an architectural form for the basis of the bridge. Using steel rods as cables, the bridge works in tension to connect the Bikeway [...]

One Step At A Time

The team spent the last two days on a footbridge that will be used to cross the drainage ditch on the north end of our site. Solving this issue was the last piece needed to connect Mulberry Street and the surrounding neighborhood to the West Ashley Bikeway! Much like our larger bridge, we wanted to [...]

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 [...]

Saturdays Are For Sitework

Our first Saturday workday is officially in the books! We headed out to site at 8am in hopes of waking up before the bugs, but no such luck. We split into two teams – girls on landscape cleanup and boys on foundation layout. Nothing like a little friendly competition to get the job done. Now [...]

It’s Draw Bridge Time

As magical, fun, and woefully useless as a Mulberry Pond drawbridge would be, it is not the kind of bridge we are proposing. Maybe after we build a castle and find some not-too-friendly alegators to defend it we'll revisit the drawbridge idea, but for now the bridge and pavilion we are proposing is much more [...]

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 [...]