Finished Product

Here are some pictures of the bus shelter as it stands at a church in the neighborhood right now. the roof is on order and will be moved on site in a month or so. hopefully everyone will be returning to participate in the final assembly.

Construction Photos

we've started construction and are hoping to install saturday/sunday this weekend. i wanted to post some quick photos because i probably won't again until after we're done.

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Porch takes form

We gave another community presentation the other night. We had a great turnout with at least 15 community members present. The amount of people was great because it is difficult to get people to come out for these kinds of meetings sometimes. We had prepared a powerpoint presentation with our first pass at a ‘real’ shelter design. The community really responded to our porch concept and they gave us some really great stories about their porches. One lady said that porches have become a signal for people moving back into the neighborhood. If porches are occupied the neighborhood is alive. They seemed to really like the first pass at the design as well, everyone had really good things to say. Although adjustable seating finally got the ax thanks to a practical woman in the crowd who was very adamant about the fact that it will get broken which is probably true.

In the design we emulated a porch with a design that has a balance of opposites in the expression of materials. The heavy wood wall anchors the back and dissolves giving way to a system of pipes. The porch works in the same way with a house anchoring the back and the porch acting as a transition point from closed to open. We incorporated a variety of seating similar to a porch – stoop seats, benches, leaning areas, and standing areas. We are working out construction details this week and start construction next week hopefully. I am working on the stacked wood wall which is really being driven by what kind of wood we can find at salvage yards. Lauren and I are going searching tomorrow to see what we can find and lay claim to them.

Kids love adjustable seating

Last week we gave a presentation to a local youth group in the neighborhood, there were probably about 30 kids from age 9 through age 17. For the presentation I was working with Mike and Mike on seating options. Our seating explorations tended to gravitate towards adjustable seating. I know adjustable seating and moving parts are generally a bad idea, however I like the idea of people users being able to adjust their surroundings and have a hand in programming the space. If you’ve seen the documentary ‘The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces’ by William H Whyte you know what I’m talking about when I say that to feel ownership over a space people generally want to arrange their seats themselves. The documentary films a series of plazas in New York City and watches how people interact in different situations, one of the situations is loose chairs and what he found was that when people have the option of moving a chair they will lift it and move it, even an inch, before they will sit in it giving them a sense of ownership and place. So that was the idea for adjustable seating in the shelter. We also used the streetcar system as a case study for moveable seats in a public setting. The streetcars here don’t loop around to go back the other direction, when they reach the end of the line they just switch the end they’re driving from and head back. Since the car isn’t turning around there is a driving platform on each end of the car and the seat backs in the car slide to the other side so people will be facing the right direction.





We developed three different seating ideas. One was taking a traditional bench and dividing it in two pieces. Then giving those pieces the ability to rotate and slide so people can sit together or apart, facing each other or away from each other. The second was to again use a traditional bench form but allow planes to rotate out of the mass providing more seating areas. Lastly we incorporated seating into a wall system. The wall would be a series of horizontal planes stacked up, then certain planes would pull out, like drawers, to create seating, footrests, shelves and places to lean. This idea provides the most variety of seating, which is something that relates back to the porch idea because a porch has several different ways you can inhabit it – steps, chairs, railings, etc.




The kids at the meeting really liked the idea of adjustable seating but also pointed out the problems – pinched fingers, maintenance, broken parts, etc. I think that our instructor really wants to put the ax down on the adjustable seating idea but he can’t because the community keeps liking the idea. We made mock up of the wall idea, trying to work out some of the problems and trying to see if it would really work. The pull out catches a little but I think that when we plane the wood boards it will be smoother. I’m really worried about the cantilever but we discussing the possibilities with an engineer who I’m sure thinks we’re crazy.

Porch

We've been developing overall concepts for what the shelter could be to the community the way we’re going about this seems almost like a school formula but it’s not. When we review there isn’t really a formal ‘critique’ everyone presents what they have, usually in groups, then we make a list of ideas and continue to work out the ideas we think are most relevant. So the ideas that no one works on get ‘Darwined’ out. No one person has ownership over an idea so people are constantly moving between ideas and groups to things they may have an idea for or have a desire to work on. This is different from a more traditional studio method which would have had all of design our own idea individually then ‘vote’ on a favorite. The way we’re doing prevents any one person from designing the whole thing, because we are all designing elements and pieces of it that we will try to incorporate together into a shelter later.

We’ve been doing a lot of community meetings with residents trying to get input on our design. As a team we’ve decided on a porch concept to move forward with. The porch is such an important thing, it has been explained to us by the residents as the lifeblood of Hollygrove. I think though that it is an important element to the entire city. It doesn’t matter what day or time you go through a neighborhood there are always people out on their porches and when you walk by they always ask how you’re doing and are always ready to have a conversation with you. By using the porch as a concept the bus shelter will hopefully become a ‘porch’ to the community of Hollygrove. So we’ve been exploring what the elements of a porch are and how they could be integrated into a bus shelter. A porch is used as a gathering place, a point of entry and in some ways a stage as well as a place to observe. These are all elements we want to incorporate. The community has really responded well to this idea because it is a language that they are familiar with and they know, more than anyone, if a porch is successful or not. One of the things that I really wanted to explore was how far porch reaches, what is the gradient of a porch from house to porch to sidewalk to street. Because the effect of a porch reaches all of those at some level.

Mrs. Jackson and her garden

A few of us went to visit one of the residents of Hollygrove the other day. Mrs. Jackson has lived in Hollygrove her entire life and she is 74 now. We had stopped by because she wanted to give us some input on our proposals for bus shelters but she was unable to attend our most recent community meeting so we said we’d just come to here. After we discussed out shelter ideas, she showed us her garden. Down here everyone kind of stops gardening during the summer months because it is so hot and the bugs get so bad so she was in the process of taking most of her plants out. She did give us a bunch of herbs – rosemary, mint, basil – and a head of garlic. It was really great, she had such great stories about the neighborhood and was really excited that we had come to visit and spend time with her.