Project Team: Emily Ashby, Joshua Cruz, Tammie Teng, Annie Tavetian
Instructors: Peter Waldman and Schaeffer Somers
Group Statement:
The studio themes of health and wellbeing in structural operations affected the group schematic design from the outset. The Westover Estate, in northwest Charlottesville off I-29, is the intended site for a Tibetan integrated medical facility and complex. The site visit offered an experience in which the healing qualities were tangible. Free from busy distractions, the land has an unadulterated natural purity and an inherent variety of sensory experiences. Each team member approached the site differently and mapped his or her experiences. Annie focused on the animals and insects living on the site, and the way they interacted with the environment. Josh paid attention to the paths and their walk-ability. Tammy looked at vegetation patterns and solar exposure. Emily thought about auditory, visual, and tactile experience. The group attempted to quantify the intuitive perceptions gathered about the site by mapping and diagramming with accurate topographic data. Each group member envisioned an array of site schemes, which included Tibetan themes and attempted to incorporate aspects of eastern and western tradition and healing methodology, community, and site specificity. The group synthesized these design strategies by overlaying our ideas with an underlying guideline extracted from the topographic slope, which the group felt affected most of the qualitative aspects of the site, including relative warmth, vegetation, views, sounds, etc. These lines made a network of paths, in which either side of the path offers a different condition and view. From this framework, the group began to accumulate site lines to emphasize relationships to existing structures, paths, and cardinal directions. With this network, the group began to locate program incrementally, determining the locations logically and making programmatic relationships. For example, the location of the meditation hall at the highest point was determined first, in the place of importance and visible from the entrance. Each individual chose an aspect of the program to further develop; Emily, a Tibetan Inn, Tammy, an East Meets West Library, Joshua, the Meditation Hall, and Annie, a medical center. Our projects are related to each other either physically through shared landscape and/or conceptually, with related themes and/or driving ideas.
About the Studio: Structure + Health
This vertical, undergraduate research studio is an ongoing dialogue between two instructors, Peter Waldman, and a new colleague, Schaeffer Somers. The research agenda lies at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and public health framing the built environment as a complex system, which has direct impacts on human health. Schaeffer’s seminar, Health Impact + Design, explores research questions at the intersection of the built environment and public health sciences, focusing on. Questions that have emerged from Schaeffer’s research in mobility, public space, and health impact assessment include:
What are the measures of health, happiness, and well-being in a human population? How does a building shape the health of its inhabitants and the community at large? What are the parameters of a livable, equitable, and prosperous urban ecology?
Beginning with an intense workshop in Structural Operations, students integrate material, structure, and building code into parametric and physical models of stairs and pedestrian bridges as key programmatic elements in promoting physical activity as well as selected case study buildings ranging from XS to XL. The
studio introduces didactic topics including visual impairments mobility, neighborhood completeness, walkability, age friendly cities, and barrier free design to inform student proposals for semester-long projects. Logicz modeling is imported from public health sciences as a tool for diagramming causal relationships in evidenced-based design. Working in teams, students propose projects that incorporate the programmatic requirements of a range of clients from the health sciences community. The territory of the studio is the gradient from University Avenue to the auto-centric commercial highway, US 29, which is a typical structure of the contemporary mid-sized American city. The projects are networked through transportation and mobility systems, and other urban ecologies. Drawing upon a lifetime of teaching culminating in the course, Lessons of the Lawn, Peter challenges the students to go beyond evidence and logic with the following prompt.
Can the sensibilities of Surveyors, Nomads or Lunatics (those who contemplate the myriad phases of the Moon) also articulate the characteristics of this extensive site and distinct programs yielding well-being in a newly explored Common Ground? There is a cast of characters, key informants and community partners who will contribute their expertise from the City of Charlottesville, UVA Dept. of Family Medicine, Dept. of Ophthalmology, Dept. of General Medicine, and Arura Medicine of Tibet. Each stakeholder and institution may represent distinct orientations with thresholds juxtaposed to enter, and then four windows to look out and finally four more to look within as sunset yields to darkness. Some may excavate deep basements, while others map the skies by day and by night. Each institution may exist as a world onto itself, but also map, envision, perhaps approximate (as an asymptote) a meditative pause between the visceral ground and the ethereal sky. These institutions of health and well-being are as distinct as Water, Fire, Earth and Air, but they all may claim the peace of the ethereal as well-being with the World. As the Academical Village and Monticello are both life-long projects, this “real project” aspires to making several centers, fragmentary frames, and spatial leaks, if not moments to trespass. We will imagine an Other vision of “A City on a Hill”, a recurrent dream in world culture of an Other paradise, an Other new beginning.”