Architecture 410 Project 1 - Urban Row Housing
Designing in an urban enviornment
Description
Architecture 410 is the first Junior-Level studio required at SARUP and we started out immediately with a site-specific project. Unlike the sophomore studios, we moved beyond the conceptual and diagrammatic process to real-world settings. The first project was creating an artist community consisting of a gallery, meeting hall and a 9-unit row house. Two goals of the project was to integrate a program to a site and design formal presentation boards. Also, unlike past projects, we were not required to build a model.
Some things I took away from this project was how to find/research precedents and their importance in design as well as how to properly document a site and the principles of row house design.
The Site
The site was situated north of the downtown, in an area known as Brewer's Hill, a residential area where most people who worked at the Schlitz Brewery lived. The brewery has since closed and the community went through a rough patch, but the area has been reinvested in, including the old brewery site which is now a sort of corporate center. The site given was a parking lot taking up half of the block used by an adjacent building. The site sloped slightly from front to back and I used it to my advantage by putting in exposed underground parking.
Site Plan
Precedents
The precedents I examined for this project were other urban row housing examples (mostly from Europe) as well as usage of louvers (one of my original ideas).
Renderings
The renderings that I chose to create were perspectives from the units overlooking the site, inside the gallery and meeting hall, 'bird's eye' and street level perspectives as well as elevations from the cardinal directions.
Individual Unit Detail
For each of the 9 required units, the program called for detail elevations and sections of each unit. Fortunately, mine were essential identical so I was able to express the detail in two renderings.
Presentation Board
For the final critique of the project we were required to produce presentation boards. My boards are shown below, combined two 36x42 color plots.
- View presentation board in full-size JPG - 5.2 mb (or click the image below)
- View presentation board in full-size PDF - 14.1 mb (or click the PDF logo)
Brochure
In addition to the presentation board, we were required to create a 'brochure' or hand-out for the critics to read before we gave our presentation to give an introduction to the project and to clearly define our concepts and goals before the critique begins.
- View presentation board in full-size JPG - 1.3 mb (or click the image below)
- View presentation board in full-size PDF - 769 kb (or click the PDF logo)
