Sow | Design of a Small Retreat Community | 50 points

 

 

This challenge will encourage the teams to develop a long-term view of design in order to create a small retreat community for your team. You will be asked to develop your own sense of what makes a good community based on intuition, research and design exploration. Your community can be high tech or low tech depending on your group’s definition of sustainability. Your community can be very expensive, built out of titanium or it can be low budget, built from natural materials found on site. Either design direction has impact on both quality of life and sustainable performance.

 

The inhabitants of this community (your team members and their descendents) wish to find peace and solace but also a sense of kindred spirit with the group. This small community also seeks to develop a unique cultural identity and wishes to express that identity in its design interventions.  Some questions to explore might include:

 

                - What lessons can be learned from your studies of indigenous culture?

                - What is the meaning of culture in the early 21^st century?

                - Which recent buildings do you believe best reflect current day culture?

- What role should technology play in the day-to-day activities of the group?

- Does technology tend to separate or connect us to/from nature, our community and ourselves?

 

Rules:

Each team can propose to build entirely from what is available on site or can bring materials to the site. Be ready to justify your decisions from a multitude of perspectives. After the project is built, there should be no need to transport resources. the community is meant to be totally self sufficient.

 

 

Assignment organization:

Each student will be responsible for locating and designing at least one of the functions listed below. A captain for the team should be assigned from the beginning.

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Program

The program is meant to simulate a monastery or permaculture community where the residents grow their own food and make some sort of product or provide a service. The product or service could reflect the unique physical and cultural realities of their given region.

 

Dwelling

• What type of living units will work best for your group? Should they all be in the same room or spread apart as separate structures?

 

Education

• How will education be achieved? What type of structure will support your educational goals?

 

Spirit

• Does your community believe in some sort of higher order to the cosmos? Are you Catholic or Buddhist or atheist? What kind of space, if any, will support your community’s religious aspirations?

 

Work/Art/Studio

• What is the business of your community? What kind of structure will support this endeavor? Where is it best located?

 

Health/Well-Being/Exercise

• Health care professionals will visit on periodic basis. This structure will support that activity as well as any alternative therapies that may be required by the community.

 

Entertainment/Relaxation

• What kinds of entertainment does your community want to have (TV, movies, theatre, live music? What location in the community is this best served?

               

Government/Civic

• This is the place where laws are made, interpreted and enforced

 

Food Preparation + Dinning

• Cooking and eating take place in this structure

 

Site Design (group)

• Food, water, energy are all to be collected/grown/harvested on site.
• What kind of diet is appropriate for your bio-region?
• What kinds of food did the native peoples of the area eat and why?

               

 

Site:

Exurban natural site at the edge of suburban development about 1.5 hours by car to the big city. Each site possesses unique physical and environmental aspects based on the assigned bioregion. Access by car off main road (this road is a strip road with commercial buildings until it reaches the site. (See attached map for further details).

 

 

 

Schedule: subject to change

 

Crit 1               Preliminary Review

• Existing site delineation and analysis
• Concept + Parti
  

 Crit 2             Mid-review

• Existing site delineated and analyzed
• Site plan at appropriate scale depicting the location of programmatic functions and their intended relationships (parti/bubble diagram). Emphasis should be placed on how the parti generates a sense of social well being, environmental connectedness and maximization of natural energy flows.
• Site model at appropriate scale @ 1”=100’ w/ massing of structures and land interventions
• Site section at appropriate scale reinforcing design concepts
• Diagrams, perspectives and axonometrics developed exclusively for the  judging criteria: environment, energy, community and aesthetics. 
• Narrative describing the social organization and cultural identity of your community.

 

Crit 3             Final Design Critique

• Updated Site plan w/ final
• Updated Site Model
• Design Detail
• Updated floor plans, sections, elevations of buildings
• Diagrams illustrating systems-based responses to judging criteria (see below)
• Final Explorative Design Detail/Object

 

 

 Judging Criteria:

 

Environment (5 points)

Green Layer: How does your project impact the existing forests?

Water Quality: How does your project impact the quality of water on the site and downstream? How does your building collect and store rainwater? How does your project design deal with human waste?

Air Quality: How does your project design affect the air quality of the immediate site? What is the indoor air quality of your building? (all seasons).

Earth Quality: How does your project design accommodate trash and other debris? Where is it stored or how might it be reused.

 

Energy (5 points)

Lighting: How is your building lit? What passive strategies will you use to avoid electric powered lighting?

Heating: How is your building heated? What passive strategies will you use to heat the interior spaces of you project?

Cooling: How is your building cooled in the warm and hot months? What passive strategies will you use to maximize cooling and avoid the use of air conditioners?

Power: If electricity will be needed for your project, how will it be collected and distributed?

Embodied Energy: Where will you get the materials to build your project? How far will they have to be transported? Which materials require more energy to make?

Food Energy: Which types of food will be easy to grow but also provide good sources of energy for the team?

 

Community (15 points)

Bio-diversity: How will your building and its inhabitants effect the local ecological balance, specifically in terms of bio-diversity?

Geography: How will your building alter the existing geographic makeup of an obviously beautiful site?

Climate: How does the design of your building reflect an understanding of the given climate?

Program: How does the arrangement of the programmatic elements encourage a sense of community?

Spirit: How does your building and site design reflect an understanding of the spiritual qualities of the site?

 

Aesthetics (15 points)

Will your building achieve long-term sustainability because it is so beautiful and wonderful that no one would be willing to tear it down in the years to come? Is it possible to derive aesthetic potential by revealing the natural systems and features of the site through your master plan and building designs?

 

Presentation (10 points)

Can you present your building in a way that allows us to easily judge all of the above categories but also communicate the design’s visual power and emotional qualities? Incomplete or sloppy presentations will be penalized. Freehand drawings to scale are acceptable. Diagrams of alternative and passive sustainable technologies will increase your score.

 

 

 

Educational Goals

·         Awareness of the theories and methods of inquiry that seek to clarify the relationships between human behavior and the physical environment.

·         Understanding of the basic principles of ecology and architect’s responsibilities with respect to environmental and resource conservation in architecture.

·         Ability to respond to both natural and built site characteristics in the design of a project.

·         Students will encounter the issues of ecology and sustainability as part of a problem solving proactive process rather than a reactive, passive process. Information will be revealed as students begin to make discoveries through innovative design responses to difficult functional problems.

·         Introduction to the idea that architecture must serve the client as well as the larger natural environment and in the process create meaningful beautiful spaces and places to inhabit.