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.

Urban Hike and Imprisoned Clouds

This morning we went on an urban hike through the a part of the canal system. We walked for about a 1 ½ to 2 miles through the London Outfall canal, which is close to the neighborhood we’re working in. The 17th Street canal was the big one that flooded during the storm, but the one we walked through definitely had some structural difficulty. You could see where there was new concrete poured and where Rebar was poking through the old areas. Some of the bridges and pipes that run across are pretty cool though, they have a really great honest functionality to them. So did the canal themselves, their purpose is overtly apparent and is the only thing on display. An instructor from Tulane took us on the tour, which is totally illegal but no one patrols the canals. When we got to our starting place a guy who was doing yard work asked us some questions like, “Whatcha y’all doing?” And we just told him that we were picking up garbage. And then another guy along the way looked over the wall and asked us if we were fixing their problems. It was kind of weird that it was so deserted, because it seemed like the perfect place for homeless people to hang out but there was absolutely no one. The little water that was there was gross, but it was really interesting to be inside this industrial infrastructure that makes the city function. Seeing the pumping stations and the drains that if they weren’t there the city would be underwater.

We spent the rest of the day in the studio talking about ideas we’ve been formulating about materials and their formal qualities. Lauren and I have been working on an idea of how to engage a community through materials. One of the ideas I had was how to reuse plastic grocery bags, because they are everywhere here. My first idea was to create Gambians, the chicken wire boxes that are usually filled with rocks that they use to reinforce earth cliffs near roads, but instead of rocks fill them with compressed plastic bags. The translucent quality of them was pretty cool. My idea was that we could tap the community to collect bags and involve them directly in the process. So, the Gambian idea is still on the table but today we presented some different ways of using the bags.

We’re trying an ironing method, because when we iron them they fuse together and create a plane that has some sort of structure, but I’m worried because they still look like grocery bags and I don’t want them to be perceived as trash. We tried folding them accordion style, almost like blinds, with cables running through them. And we tried embossing the plastic over itself to express an image or information. I’m not sure how it would work out in an actual bus stop because I don’t think we could prevent people from messing with it. We’re also developing an idea of how the shelter can be a porch for the community, a gathering place. At the end of the presentations we went around and listed off ideas that we liked in an attempt to pull out the ideas that are the strongest. The idea is to move away from the typical school structure of cultivating your own ideas, but to somehow combine everyone’s ideas into one cohesive idea that will be a shelter rather than 11 different ideas next to each other. The people in the neighborhood seem psyched about what we’re doing and are excited to have it as a beacon to the rest of the city expressing how Hollygrove is still here and has some good things happening.

Ain't no party like a ReBirth party!

Last night we went to the Maple Leaf Bar to see ReBirth Brass Band, which is a New Orleans jazz staple. They play about an 8 piece brass band, pretty typical brass music, but probably one of the best musical acts ever. ReBirth plays every Tuesday night at Maple Leaf and it is $12 to get in, which is kind of steep but seriously worth it. Not only are they phenomenal musicians but they are also killer performers. Their music was non-stop and they were really interactive with the crowd. The venue was a small shotgun house that had been converted into a bar and the place was packed wall to wall with people, it was a big sweaty mess. The music had a really strong New Orleans flavor - fast, poppy, brassy - you immediately knew where their roots were and that they’d been playing here for years. They didn’t go on until 11:30 pm but they play until 3:30 am or later. About 7 of us went and danced all night, when we left we were deaf for about an hour, but it was totally worth it. We’ll definitely be going back.

www.rebirthbrassband.org

Beignets and Coffee

A few of us got up early to go to Café Du Monde and have coffee and beignets. They are really as good as everyone says – golden crispy goodness covered in mountains of powdered sugar. I was waiting for someone to sneeze and for powdered sugar to go everywhere. By the end we all had powdered sugar all over our faces, but definitely good and worth the trip downtown.

Materials Studies - Round Two

After we did our initial material studies, we went for a round two. This time I went back to the salvage yard and found some more steel brackets that were smaller than the last ones and also came across this stack of bright orange sacks that looked really cool all stacked on top of one another. Using the sacks as filler, I compressed them between the steel brackets. When held up against the light the sacks glow a bright orange which is a neat effect, but combined the two materials create an interesting juxtaposition between a domestic textile and an industrial material. Right now, we aren’t yet thinking about the design of the bus shelter. We are just exploring materials and products, seeing what they can and can’t do (Jim – material gallery. Anyone?) I think it is just about every architecture students dream to be sent to a salvage yard with a credit card and then set loose on a shop, just to see what will happen.

We’re one step closer to choosing a site. We met with the Regional Transit Authority last week and presented to them the sites that we were considering because we couldn’t put a shelter on any site that they were planning to build on. Being a bureaucratic entity they were less than inviting but I think we’ll be able to work things out. They are still trying to recover from Katrina as well, but I really don’t think that is any excuse for how screwy the public transportation system is here. One example is that it is $1.25 to ride the bus and $.25 for a transfer, BUT you can’t use that transfer on the same bus line that you get it from. I found that out the hard way. There also aren’t any maps or schedules really available – people just show up to a stop and hope that it comes and hope that it takes you where you want to go. It’s ridiculous. During the presentation with the RTA, I kind of wanted to raise my hand and tell them that I was from Portland, the mecca for mass transit, and that I could give them a few pointers. After talking to some of the residents, I guess the system was pretty inefficient even before the storm there was just more lines and buses whereas now it is a quarter of what it was. The two stops we are considering are on the edge of the Hollygrove neighborhood, we’re hoping that it will be a gateway of sorts to the neighborhood because they are both on main thoroughfares. One is adjacent to a busy intersection and gets a steady stream of riders, but is really visible to the general public. The second is over by Xavier University, and is a little less visible but is used a lot more. The environment here has two extremes that we are battling – torrential down pours and direct, intense sun. Those are the two basic elements that a bus shelter will protect people from and these challenges are most prevalent at the second site, so I think that we are leaning towards that one.

Food

We’ve been doing a lot of family-style dinners at home because we have kitchens and access to a bbq. We are just rotating nights that people cook for everyone. These are some kebobs that I made on Friday, chicken and veggies. One of the guys made watermelon margaritas from fresh watermelons we got from Mississippi and then we played Apples to Apples which is a great way to get to know the kind of people you are living with. It was fun.
Sunday morning, Erica (my roommate) made something she calls Special Breakfast that her dad used to make when she was a kid. It is cottage cheese sandwiched in Ritz crackers, dipped in egg and then fried on both sides in a pan. I have to say that I was really skeptical about it but it really turned out to be rather good. The cracker stays crispy because the egg cooks fast and the cottage cheese stays cool in the center because of the fast cooking time. The texture difference was really interesting. I’m definitely going to try to make it when I get home.

Salvage Yard Adventure

We’ve officially started studio work and I have to say that I love being back in an academic studio atmosphere. It is really weird to be in a studio with new people because so much stuff is the same, like crits, desk spaces, music, etc. but it is all totally different because none of the people I was used to being in studio with were there. We spent one day this week searching salvage yards for materials to do exploration studies of materials that we found. We were basically just looking for materials that we thought were cool or interesting. We ended up only having time to go to two places. One is called The Green Project which is almost like the ReBuilding Center in Portland. They had a lot of housing things like doors, windows, bathroom fixtures, siding, etc. The other was the Habitat ReStore. Then we had to explore what our materials could do. I had collected some rusted steel L angles because I liked the color and texture of the rust but I also wanted to explore the nature of being confined to the qualities of the angles as well – length, shape, size. I also picked up some old railings that I planed down and exposed some really beautiful Cyprus wood. I ended up constructing a column like structure that sandwiched the wood between the steel angle. It came out looking a lot more delicate than I had thought it would. These aren’t the best pictures but I will try to upload more later.

For Rent

We passed this house the other day driving around and I thought it was funny and kind of appropriate for some of the things going on here.