So this is the project that has occupied my studio time the past few weeks.  The site is imaginary, based on the warehouse district qualities of the south end.  We just received the 3 building sites we can choose from this week, you can see the result of that in a few days.  Anyways from the project is a high rise residential, and because it was only a 2-week “competition” style project during which we were to come up with a concept, building units and a unit aggregation strategy it was really difficult (especially when all my other classes are refusing to bow to studios whims this semester).  To add spice and a starting point we picked from 4 “life style scripts” which were Urban Family, Live/Work, Bicycle-commuter housing, and Workforce housing.  I picked Live/Work because I enjoyed working with the idea in my housing for Rome.  However in America, which has things like actual building codes, Live/Work is a strict idea of a small apartment, mostly assumed to be for artists, with all sorts of rules about what is considered real Live/Work.  I decided to reconceptualizing Live/Work to include a broader range of lifestyles mainly to include the self-employed and work at home, as well as small business owners who own the ground floor retail or rent office space within the building.  By doing so I am allowing the idea of Live/Work to return to the days when many people actually did live above or near their place of work, instead of commuting for hours each day.  The building will strive to help balance the lives of its occupiers, because just because you have less separation from work does not mean you should spend all day at it.  Anyways this building needs lots of work, but I am pretty happy with the response to my concept from the crits, which was positive but wanted me to incorporate it more strongly into my building.  Given the two week time limit, having a good concept is the important part.  We’ll see how well I manage it for the final.

Prototyping Live/Work