FiN Submissions

These were my submissions for the Future is Now.  This first one is a proposal for an "incremental" urban park the City has been talking about.  Replacing a parking lot with a public park is a great idea, but the images the Development Department had put out were uninspiring and unresponsive to the human needs for which the park should provide -- like shade and seating.  Click the image below to see the actual proposal with diagrams and explanations.

The next is an idea of how to reuse some of the unsightly parking decks around downtown.  The concept is basically 1) to infill the bottom with leasable space that would activate the sidewalk with pedestrian life while still providing parking above 2) clad the parking floors to make the building feel more like part of the urban fabric.



Finally is a proposal I did with a Mike Shows for the riverfront entry.  We heard the City was wanting to improve the entry and give it prominence (with very little money) so we showed some simple changes to make the underground entry noticeable and more inviting.  I think of it as a temporary solution... maybe soon we can design a more inspiring and permanent intervention.

A Tid-bit on Architecture

I’ve been meaning to post some architectural design work on here for a while now, so this is at least a start.  Now in my fifth and final year of architecture school I’m currently working on my “thesis” project — “thesis” is in quotations because it is a little different from what it is in other professions.  It is basically an idea/understanding that arises through our investigations on a particular architectural subject matter.  Mine, so far, is about the intentional manipulation of light and perception through boundary (more on that some other time).

The medium of investigation is the design of a building in downtown Montgomery, a once thriving city devastated, like so many, by the advent of the car.  With the car came glorified suburbia, and out went people.  As pedestrians disappeared so did storefronts… empty buildings were torn down for parking lots/garages, and streets were widened to speed traffic.  This left the urban fabric in shambles and pretty unsuitable for pedestrian use.

You can see in this figure ground map of downtown how sparse the street frontage is– pretty much all the blank space (other than the streets of course) is parking.  I color coded the heights of buildings to show the lack of density: the lightest shade represents 1 and 2 story buildings while darker is taller.  Thankfully, now that people are beginning to realize these flaws and the beauty of good urbanism, the city is working hard to revitalize through proper planning.

 In small groups we researched the city and their overarching planning proposals to make our own proposals to revitalize specific portions of the urban fabric.  Out of these proposals came our individual building projects that we are working on for the rest of the year.

Mine (represented by the small orange dot on the map) is basically an observation tower that serves as a terminus for a major street and the backdrop of a new public park/plaza a classmate and I are designing across from the baseball stadium.  Above are  just a couple little images from earlier this semester.