Bjork finds a model of a city inside her TV

All the work we have been doing on models in Studio 3 (and watching the undergrads put together their models earlier this semester) has reminded me of one of my all-time favorite videos on YouTube, where Bjork explains how TV works. This makes me want to put some circuit boards in my model. You can enjoy it here.

Studio Project 3

The Studio 3 gang is busy creating site plans and three dimensional models of portions of our neighborhood infill sites. Here is my terrain after a couple of days of cutting topo lines from chip board. We are all working at twenty scale: one inche equals twenty feet. I decided to build a wooden frame for my model, to keep it from warping but also to provide a square edge that I could lay my layers of board into and use as a jig to keep everything in line.


Here Austin is finishing up the pen work on some really sharp looking section drawings. He is getting all his 2D stuff done before starting the 3D model.


Meanwhile over on Casey's side of the room an oval-shaped neighborhood park is beginning to emerge out of chipboard and blades. It's truly magical!

Studio 3 Project 2

I have neglected my blog for nearly a month and I feel pretty bad about it. Here is the main reason: our graduate studio class was working on this infill development project. A good bit of time was devoted to the SketchUp model, and I am including the fly-through movie here. I pulled the two-foot contours up pancake style, and drew my roads and sidewalks right onto the pancake terrain. This was a little time consuming. Some of the buildings I drew into the model, others were pulled up out of a flat version of the master plan and moved.

The site is a 31-acre area between town and campus. A historically significant cotton mill is on the site, that's the big red building with the rows of large windows in the model. There are some other buildings, but I chose not to keep them. Part of the site is in the FEMA 100-year flood zone. That's where I put the constructed wetland.

The concept was "home". The design is meant to foster aging in place. A specialty grocery store, recreational opportunities, retail and mixed use buildings should provide residents with all their daily needs right there in the neighborhood. The idea of "neighborhood completeness" which Douglas Farr introduces as a modified version of LEED-ND certification requirements in his book Sustainable Urbanism drives this design.

Right off I will admit that the entrance from Spring Street has a problem in that the two towers frame a view of the corner of the assisted living center. In the model I ran out of time and didn't finish all the roads. Also you can see on the master plan that there are a lot more trees on the plan than are visible in the model. I think there are some good things in this plan, and there are a lot of things that need work. Go ahead and start tearing it up; I can take it.