Dancing Nancies....

Its been awhile...sorry. So the pics says it all. right now i feel like we are just dancing around in circles. When we think we are making a step forward we have to take two steps back. and i dont know about you but i don't like dancing in circles its dizzy. i want to dosey doe my way on. We are currently having to go back to the dreaded porch yet again and revise. i understand that that must happen from time to time, but it seems that we have never had a solid foundation to revise. however there have been some baby steps in the right direction, we laid the gravel for the signage. yep so thats about it. i'll add more crazy pics and structure stuff later.

Exquisite Corpse

Looking for a good one liner is hard. So i'm just going to skip that part. So here is the meat of whats good.  We are working well together ;)

We had an exquisite corpse with our professor that was sort of intense. in the sense, wow she really just did an exquisite corpse with us. wow. but it proved to be really helpful. It got us to think differently about how to approach the project and really helped shaped our concept (which is layering btw). from there we had a couple (by that i mean two) days to get a presentation ready for our round robin. Which turned out great. We got some awesome feedback and overall a pretty well received project.  And i quote, "Guys I am actually pleased" or something along those lines.  So overall we are making it happen. I guess that was the cheesy opening line i was going to say earlier should have kept it to myself.

Bonfire!!!

  Well i don't know about everyone but i feel like we finally accomplished something this week. It took about an hour and a half but the Ron box has fallen.  After "elegantly" ushering it into its demise we burned that bad boy.  With some of the left over wood, I made makeshift benches for people to sit on.  Surprising most of them were pretty sturdy.  A few people had thought that we meant to leave these benches for the community, sorry it was just for the fire. haha. But that did inspire some of us to actually consider making the brick patio/ fire pit space more user friendly opposed to an area designated for signage.

It wasn't a huge turnout but those that did show up thank you. The fire was hot and the atmosphere was welcoming.  Some of the community came out and fellowship with us. Repeated Mr. Napoleon (community member down the way) would say that we are doing a good thing.  I think he may have been talking on a microscopic level about the fire, or he was just nostalgic.  Apparently the townspeople used to have these great bonfires but have stopped doing it.  And no one had ever really used the fire pit before so they were excited to see the flames.  They drew out Mr. Ronnie (dj RonDMC) from his house when he saw the flames.  We talked and laughed all night long which made me feel good.  Thats all i needed to re-ignite my personal fire/passion for this project. It was definitely waning.

On that note, here are some SU mockup of how cubes/nodes could play within the landscape and ultimately the porch. feedback is much sought after....

                  

Getting her done

Blane, you are the man.

We are getting her done...the model that is. It took someone saying well i'm going to just do it, b*tch me out later. I tried to take the role and I ended screwing up something up i.e. the egg-crate. LOL but the model looks good, seriously. All the essential parts (site specifics) are in place. All that is left is to make the iterations and seeing how they play in with the existing site. Right now we are mocking up a very simple design for the patio spillage over (pic soon to follow). In the meantime here is a photomontage of how it may look.

The patio is raised 3' from the grade. From there it spills over into the interior space, and is spliced by the 'super' ramp. The splice creates a orator space closest to the memory block. From there stairs reach out into the landscape.

This other photomontage tries to express a more sacred interior space defined by a series of extruded cubes known affectionately as nodes (big orange blob-didnt get chance to insert cubes). These nodes are dense in this space and become pixalated as it transverses the landscape. Some of the nodes emit light in fractal patterns to create a 'web' between the nodes (a special night feature). Accessibility occurs along the perimeter of the space. The ramp along the Western side straddles the original foundation of the Keese Barn, and the stairs linking the site to Farmers' Hall create the other boundary. (insert twist) The link between the steel stairs and the concrete stairs becomes severed and reorient. The steel stairs reemerges itself back into the footprint along the Clemson axis. Two of the concrete stairs are removed and the two remaining act as a 'soapbox' for speakers. The position is perfect for the speaker to engage the community (space) and provides ideal backdrop (memory block).

"you have to start somewhere"

I Love It....

Do i have an opinion on anything....yes, but at the end of the day its just that.

Progress, progress, progress. We make one step forward and take two steps back.  I love how we come together for are ever imminent and necessary design meetings just to make decision as a group, and then when there is a little resistance, cave.  When group decisions are made after discussing individual opinions, we should stand by our decision instead of bringing up things we dismissed as a group.  Just repeating ideas that we decided didn't work within our concept makes us look as though there is no cohesion or discussion-basically not a group.  Either we need to listen more carefully to each others opinion before we dismiss it, or maintain our stance.

This past week has been tough.  The group has gone through great bounds to further relations with the Pendleton Community.  The clean-up and the random trips to Pendleton really have helped.  

We designed a egg-crate system for the landscape/patio.  The formwork looked really nice (thanks to our digital guru).  After some discussion about how the decking should go, I laid them out on the egg-crate.  It was laborious but needed to be done.  Granted there were a few options about how these should go.  One option was longitudinal, and the other was multidirectional.

However, I f*ed it up with trying to stain the wood. Bad call, james.  However we are working on a revision that implements the grid but not so harshly. 

Cube and nodes.....

Feb 2nd

So no unique title this week but i do have the answer to life...42 (too bad that doesn't seem to help me any).

Let's see, since the last post we have had a mini-review, another scheduled soon, group design meetings, and surveyed the site.  So we have been pretty busy.  You can check out the girls posts to hear more of what's been going on. My personal quest has lead me to re-evaluate the puzzle porch.

How to make it more function as a porch while maintaining a unity with the entire site. 

So i have been throwing some ideas together of how to make it more than a porch maybe not a puzzle, yet still having this revealing element. so it has become more of a 3 phased porch. phase one is simple; two is revealing (a crank portion that reveals the concrete); three is blending in two direction a) into the memory block (puzzle has turned into a wall puzzle) and b) to a lower deck that bleeds into the interior space and begins the ramp/step/seated space.

Puzzle Porch

So we are gearing up to enter "Phase 2" of the Keese Barn Site, and I couldn't be more excited. The seven (me, sab, swade, janis, nobby, brooding toad, and blane) of us--sorry i had to count---are about to dive in this joker. "Phase 2" starts by building off of Phase 1, duh. lol. No but we have a few things we are really going to focus on first: porch, lighting, seating, community space, and safety. Right now we want to remain as vague as possible for our own sanity.

I really am inspired by the sliding puzzle toy. What if the porch had this mobility sliding in a fashion similiarly to the puzzle to reveal historical tib-bits especially the concrete slab.

There still is a lot of tweaks to be made - hopefully by Friday. Check out the video of this puzzle (of course it would need drastic simplification

so that people could solve it). But this is just my take on the porch BUT it is a team effort.