The project called to design a community learning center for the village of Shorewood, a suburb of Milwaukee. The center combined 3 studio spaces, a lecture hall, a gallery, yoga and meditation space and an amphitheater. The restaurant currently at Hubbard Park was to be removed. I placed the amphitheater facing east so that the evening sun setting in the west would light the actors, but not blind the audience from seeing the performance. I organized the spaces based on a series of small massing models we produced where in the final one I placed the circulation spaces vertically and the usable spaces horizontally. The spaces are arranged around a central point or 'pin' where the bathrooms, stairs and elevator are located. Connected to the pin is a spine that serves as the circulation from the front to back of the site, though the people could also do it outside weather permitting. The structural systems that I used included a space-frame over the lecture hall, steel and glass envelope for the stairways, poured concrete walls for the studio spaces and a suspended truss system for the gallery. Also, one of the goals of the project was to engage both the hillside and the river which I feel I did effectively.
The site is along the Milwaukee River. The site contains a park with some benches and paths and has a very steep slope up to the railroad bed. There is a tunnel connecting the two sides of the hill for the roadway, and a smaller tunnel to connect a parking lot on the other side to the park.
