THE END OF THE BEGINNING AND THE RETURN OF A PREVIOUS BEGINNING TURNED INTO THE BEGINNING OF AN END?
D.B URB-AP3 2022
INTRODUCTION
There's a strange motivation that always sparks that I utilize often when festering up projects like this. I create a lot of things from a place lacking of joy, just criticism and irritation. This is one of those projects. This motivation does not spark from the project itself, but rather the location I've invested myself into for this finale.
In our class and now final unit "Urban Planning", we looked at what it meant to design cities with the best interest in not only the space, but also its community. This meant looking at how urban planners go about creating spaces that capture the feelings of welcoming, relaxation, community-focused centers of attention that the population can fall back to and feel at peace in. Having watched videos on the critique of underutilized dead spaces in cities, automobile-focused and mainly anti-pedestrian street designs, and even how certain buildings spoke to a space, there was a lot of valid criticism placed on how a city should feel.
Videos, of course, aren't enough to rely on. We ended up talking to Daniel from Kimley-Horn, an airport urban planner, Peter Exley, a co-founder of the firm "Architecture is Fun", and lastly a revisit from our friends from Whitney.
Below you'll find the action project's primary goal and how I approached it, enjoy.
PERFECTING PULASKI
Wrapping up for my finale, I decided to revisit my high school roots. We were tasked with finding a block to redesign, and I settled on my freshman year high school: Curie Metro High School and its antagonizing 4 lane / 4 way intersection right by it.
The goal here is to improve this design to suit its purpose to the community more neatly. Having numerous previous friends from Curie I'm still in contact with made connecting with this community fairly easy.
My now-graduated friend told me that she "always hated" how that everything always felt really crowded when leaving the building, especially around the bus stop across since it seemed very closed in and tightly packed with other students waiting around.
So there's already an issue that's addressed to focus on, along with my ungodly amount of complaints about the space.
Let's take a look at the space we'll be working with now.
4Courtesy of Google Earth, we've got our area and perimeter pre-established in the screenshot of this oddly-shaped place.
As you can see, I've chosen to redesign the 4-way intersection and the school itself.
Below is my own personal 2D redesign of the chosen layout, you'll notice some key changes:
- There's a "dead space" parking lot with an abandoned restaurant right next to the bus stop that the students pass through frequently when school is dismissed. I want to recreate this place to be a sanctuary space for people to enjoy while they wait for their bus instead of crowding around the curb.
- The four lane streets have been shrunken down into a two lane as they're going passed the school, as it doesn't make any sense to have cars driving fast by while students are frequently walking through. According to (if I recall correctly) Peter Exley in our FE with him, the design of those small and cramped streets around schools are intentionally designed. A driver's more inclined to drive fast in bigger lanes than one that's already crowded.
- The design changes for Curie itself are minimal in the 2D render, but ultimately I would like to create a building that feels good to walk up to, that makes you want to admit you're part of the school. One of the noticeable differences is the high focus on how I would redesign their green space, which I've always have been mildly annoyed at due to its lack of welcoming. The current state of the green space is the pinnacle of using nature to cover up the ugliness of a prison-block styled building in the most watered down approach possible. I want it to feel good to walk through, to see from out the building, to sit around for a little while and create hangout plans with friends.
- Sidewalks are going to be doubled in size and have trees and flowerbeds running through the middle section to make the sidewalks look lively. This is how I plan to utilize the open space provided by converting the block street into two lanes.
- Lastly, on the smallest of notes, I'm adding a stop light by the four-way intersection barely visible top north on the Google Earth image. This area sucks to walk through as a pedestrian because cars do not ever stop. This is also a four lane so they drive fast. What's worse is the tightly compacted sidewalks that feel often like they want to boot you into the street.
Ultimately I'm attempting to provide a slow-paced space that wants to greet you in the morning and keep you a little longer in the afternoon as you're walking out of school. I want to create a center of pride that stands giant amongst high schools, something that would speak to the numbers that the school hosts, while also speaking for the people that those numbers represent. Every time I walked out of that building, scattered around were students lounging around where they could outside the building while they waited to be picked up. There was the awkwardly placed benches that hadn't been in the best of shape, the uncomfortable stone bollards by the exit next to the parking lot, or simply standing around the plain green spaces. It's a clear call for a space that provides welcome to students for the mornings and afternoon, and an even better motivator to keep them going to the school.
With that in mind, I began working on a 3D model in Minecraft, a video game I am more than comfortable with constructing my imagination in, to perfect my vision.
Below you'll find a video I've taken of my rebuilding of the Pulaski intersection and Curie High School. I'll be making notes on my design choices below the video.
The black spaces that are crossed off in the video are already established business buildings that I know couldn't be really bargained with tampering, and there's places that I personally find add to the charm. Me and my friend used to buy pan dulce (sweet bread) and paletas (Mexican-styled ice cream) on Fridays to close out for the week, but the walk there was near that forsaken crosswalk that I'd have to play leapfrog to get across.
Up across from the school redesign, you have where I've established my sanctuary space for pedestrians, which shares a similar structure to something like a fancy outdoor porch. There's desks and seats with a complex design I'm not exactly sure would be too practical but I think it's fun. There's a work table/bench duo where a tree is grown in the center that has space for flowers (I didn't put any since Minecraft doesn't have the flora that I would like to be in place). There's room for bushes and flowers in the corner of the sanctuary space that I added to stray away from the heavy amount of brown variants for the color palette of the sanctuary. Around this space is floor lighting similarly styled to that of certain parts of Downtown's Millennium Park. I like these kind of lights because of the fact that it doesn't take away from the visual beauty of the sanctuary itself. Lastly, I decided to integrate a bus stop resting bench into the sanctuary space itself, instead of separating it from the bus stop. I originally found that had I not done this, a poorly manufactured bus stop would take away from the sanctuary's energy and welcoming.
On another small note, I made sure to add space to the actual road for the bus to fit into its stop, before transferring back into the two lane. It's a small detail but still one nonetheless.
Down the same sidewalk on the sanctuary side, we have my approach to greenery and my vision for what a bigger sidewalk would look like, which was inspired by a video created by Jeff Speck, a city planner, on how to make a city more "walkable." People enjoy nature, and there's a lot you can do with sidewalks alone that I found particularly interesting. Given not to the degree that Jeff Speck was able to advocate for, but still in some ways, a homage to it.
The reason as to why I didn't complete the design for every sidewalk neighboring the black spaces and only near the sanctuary is I didn't feel compelled to. I wanted to clarify in my notes here that these serve as "reference points" that would be applied to the other sidewalks all the same, so you can get an idea of what the rest of the block would look like rather than me going through a repetitive cycle of reconstructing the same idea all over.
Finally though, we have the Metro Curie High School building. This was incredibly time-consuming, as I wanted to create something that would carry the pride and beauty that a school deserves. Like before, I only completed half of the building redesign in hopes that it would give you an idea of what the rest of the building would look like.
As we're approaching the school, you'll see a big ol' "C" in the school's sport team colors. The goal here is that school pride, so I figured nothing screams it like Curie Condor's sport team colors in the very front of the building. The building design didn't have any specific reference in mind, and naturally began to carry university-like features as I continued to construct it from scratch. I changed the fencing around the green space they have (which was originally a small black iron gate) into stone to give it the feeling of a protected garden walkway, with arched entrances into the green space that has a traditional pathing to keep a comforting feeling of welcome as you're greeted by the flora and shade of the protective trees.
Around the outside of the stone walls are what was supposed to be painted stripes of the school's sport team colors circling around the entire way, with red at the entrances, blue at the end points, and white in the in-between, stylized to be the order of which the colors of Curie are arranged.
Inside the garden walls, we have the large trees mentioned before serving as the support for seating and tables with a view of the inside of the school, serving as a nice view point for both outside and inside. The lamps scattered around aren't too distracting, or at least that was what my intention was for them.
Lastly the actual building design itself captures color that holds a modern framed look, straying away from the blandness of the original brown blocks it was. What I felt like the previous building model design lacked was any sort of depth, everything felt flat. I made sure to create curvature wherever I could see it reasonably fitting to explore this untapped depth that allows it to advocate for itself rather than fall to a green space making it worth looking at.
IT SURE DOES COVER SDG-11
On the nose here, but this reconstruction of this block had to have some connection to SDG-11, which is a sustainable development goal focused on making "cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable." Although I believe you could pick out exactly how I've done this by a read through of my design process, I'm going to outline them here.
Another of my friends at Curie actually had gotten hit by a truck during his time at the school by the crosswalk that connects from the school to the bus stop, with multiple other cases of car crashes happening a little too frequently for my comfort there. So the redesign of making a 4-lane into a 2-lane was intentionally targeted towards the fact that drivers feel too care-free around a school hosting over 2,000 students. This was my target concern in regards to safety. As for sustainable, creating sidewalks with enough space to pick up a bike and get through with no problem would advocate for students attempting to get to school to be encouraged (but not forced) to put biking up for consideration as a mode of transport to the school, along with the complimentary greenery designed to create refreshing atmosphere, I say I've established these goals quite nicely.
Conclusion
I'm really concerned regarding how forcefully intense GCE's core classes are designed. Every year it's the same time of stressor of 5PM deadline for all work at the end of a semester with a rubric that calls for creativity that the time frame does not offer. This project calls for an initiative that doesn't deserve the pressure of the final week. Primarily collecting a relevant quote from a resident of the area to me comes off as the rubric wanting students to get out there and immerse themselves in the block they've chosen. Unless the block you've chosen is right next to your house, it's difficult to even imagine myself having the time to go afterschool all the way out to such a place and have questions composed for residents of the area at the same time when I've got two other action projects calling for the same kind of attention, all in a shorter period of time.
Overall, no thanks. This is one of my final action projects I'm producing for GCE and I'm glad that it's this way.
Thank you for reading.
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