Exploring Soft Issues

Guest Review

Our second invited jury review is scheduled for next week April 28th!  You will have a ½ hour to present and ask questions/get feedback. Your focus should be on preparing work to illustrate the main issues and a proposal in response to those issues.  It is important however that you also take time to illustrate your future direction with this project and any questions you may have that you want these guys to help answer.

I have posted the drawing requirements for this presentation. Try and focus on quantity and clarity.

Precedents/Zoning Studies

This week I have looked at the zoning, the correct one, and some precedents. Really I was just looking for some options for layouts but I came across SMR Architects from Washington state. http://www.smrarchitects.com/?p=artist_live_work
This image is of their Hiwatha project. It was a 60% income artist live work project with 60 units. They also have some really interesting Affordable projects on their site.








I am working on images showing the difference of a FAR of 3 to a FAR of 3.25
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388 Somerville Ave.

I have been developing the existing layout for 388 Somerville Ave. This is located in the middle of Site 1. Viewing the site from the Somerville Ave. side, it has the empty lot on the left side and a smaller buidling on the right side. Unfortunately I am unable to gain access to the building because it is all private residences. So I am forced to do some investigating to find out a reasonable floor plan setup. There are many steps needed to find out how the building is set up. The first step was to simply see how many mailboxes there are and how many door bells. I concluded that there are 8 apartments inside this building. If you check out the assessing information here, you will notice that there are 8 bathrooms, 8 bedrooms and 24 total rooms. Since I concluded there are 8 apartments, all of them have to be 1 bedroom apartments. Now the next step is figuring out where the stairs are located. I think everything else will fall into place after that.

I am sorry if all the links didn't work properly... I keep getting some error message that says html: meta not allowed... Whatever that means... I tried redoing this thing 3 times but keep getting the same message

Test Post

Hi guys, this is a test post to see if my links are working. I guess you could say I am slow to this blogging thing... Hopefully this link will give you the Incident Report. I posted it up in the documents folder under Site 1. I am praying for this to work so you guys don't laugh at me!

Market Basket Incident Report

I went to the Somerville Police this week to find out if I could get some more information about the Market Basket Site. I am pleased to report that I finally have the Incident Report.

The report goes over the last 10 years that the police have either been called to the location, arrested anyone and even citations. The less severe cases (like vandalism) greatly outnumber the severe ones (like robberies). This just to give you a taste of what the report contains: There are over 2,000 reports to the police at the Market Basket location from 2000-2010. That is more than 185 per year and 16 per month.

Affordable Housing Development Competition

The Somerville Community Corporation recently sponsored a student team for the 2010 Affordable Housing Development Competition. Students from graduate programs in planning and real estate development team up with local developers to create detailed development proposals for securing affordable housing. Each proposals is to be, "specific enough — as to the proposed development's economic, physical, and political feasibility — to convince a financial institution to make a predevelopment loan."

Jeremy Wilkening has passed along the students proposal for the Kiley Barrel site in Union Square (you can find it in our studio document/readings folder or click here).

The nature of this exercise demands an enormous amount of teamwork and coordination. The depth of the proposal from SCC's group illustrates the diverse range of factors to be considered when developing in urban corridors. This proposal also demonstrates the degree to which projects are realized prior to the architectural design process. I imagine that many of the students who put this proposal together have training in architectural design however, the exercise is ultimately focused on feasibility related to costs. With that said, this report is shaped nicely by local census data from the U.S. Census Bureau , market analysis, funding sources, proforma analysis, apartment layout studies, sustainable systems consideration, cultural context analysis and even data from a survey they wrote.

Exercise #4 - Site 02

I focused on finding the connection of Site 02 to Union Square.

Connections & Meeting Area

I chose to share these two images, because I feel that they run in parallel but not necessarily hand in hand. The idea of expanding the "meeting space" issue by utilizing the issue of "connection" will be a challenge.

The suggestion of visual "connection", to the street below will be easy; this could increase the "meeting area" vertically. While doing this though, there is a need for a prevention of noise/light connection" due to traffic.

Exercise #4

Refined Insecurity

These are two previous mappings/drawings that I felt needed a minimal amount of revision because they seemed to work well visually. I did add the descriptions to the bottom to clarify the point I am trying to convey. I think these insecurity observations can be studied further and implemented into the design. One of the next steps may be to discover why certain places do not give the sense of insecurity.

'Double Loaded' Reading

The reading for this week "...is the story of the efforts of one American architectural practice to get developer-clients to break out of the deeply entrenched conventions of housing design to accept not-more-costly architectural alternatives to the drab and oppressive double-loaded corridor. It is meant to suggest that architects can help improve everyday American architecture through their deliberate and theoretically self-conscious imagination of better options, their economic realism, and their powers of rational persuasion...".

Urban Designer Tim Love and his band of pragmatist visioneers at Utile, Inc. cultivate design agency through adopting the shop talk of their developer/clients. Making a case for 'market differentiation', Utile, Inc. operates within real-estate development principles to promote new typologies for urban housing. The Trolley House project in south Boston seems to be the most illustrative realization of Love's practice.

Walkable Maping

Found this Map of Boston showing the the walkablility tied in with the transit system. It is from http://wiki.walkscore.org/transit-score

Urban Scale/Patterns

Last night during Andrews review I was trying to think of the name a book about urban scales and patterns. Well the name of the book is "To Scale: One Hundred Urban Plans" by Eric Jenks. I talked to my friend who has a copy and I am hopefully going to be able to borrow it and bring it in for next class.

http://www.amazon.com/Scale-One-Hundred-Urban-Plans/dp/0415954002

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