It is crazy to thing about how fast time is going – I only have a few weeks left of my undergraduate career! I’m definitely going to have to make the last few weeks really count.
This past week was spring break! It is always nice to have a break about halfway through the semester and recharge for April, which every year always seems to be the busiest month of the year. This year I went home to Colorado to spend some time with my family which was great. My mom and I got to watch the Bachelor finale together, I stopped by the Broncos stadium to pick up a Super Bowl Champions shirt, and on my second to last day home it snowed which was quite the contrast compared to the weather here in Los Angeles! It was a really relaxing break.
The snow in my backyard!
With finals approaching, I wanted to talk more about the semester long group project for my building science class that we have be working on. We are entering into a real competition called “Timber in the City,” and the idea behind the competition is to design a mid-rise, mixed-use complex with affordable housing units, a NYC outpost of the The Andy Warhol Museum and a new and expanded home for the historic Essex Street Market, with the project site located in the lower east side of Manhattan. It is also imperative to focus on wood as a building material, and to explore the ways that wood can be used in an innovative way to create new structural and aesthetic systems.
So far my group has focused on the schematic design, where we figured out the massing and sizing of all the different components of the project and how they fit together on the site. We wanted to have really modern and dynamic forms that play of the different capabilities of wood. The museum is located in the middle of the site and focuses on wood used vertically, and then the market and residential are located around the perimeter of the site and focus on the horizontal capabilities of wood.
The layout of the massing on our site.
After decided on our massing, we progressed by working on the interior spaces and creating floor plans. We had to decided the layouts of all the different residential unit layouts, as well as the circulation within the museum and market spaces. The next steps will be working on the structure of our buildings, as well as the exterior facade! We are excited to see how it will turn out and hopefully further down the road we will do well in the competition. As we do more work, I will keep you updated! Wish us luck!
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