Student: Danielle Eads
Instructors: Peter Waldman and Schaeffer Somers
Project Statement:
This program for an East meets West Center for Medicine on the site of an early 20th century estate reinhabits an old Sears Roebuck barn, with a plan to rejuvenate the abandoned barn complex and create a new Tibetan village for the practice of alternative medicine. An initial study of structural operations at Augustin und Frank’s physics building in Berlin translates into the light, tenuous design interventions within and around the barn. Herb garden scaffolding wraps the southern and eastern edges for shading, also providing the ingredients for natural remedies created in the on-site lab. A catwalk in the sky extends out of the western facade to Blue Ridge Mountains. This reinhabited barn is a stimulus for the rejuvenation of the entire barn village and a step in the direction of the melding of East meets West medicine. The integrity of the original braced rafter gable construction is reserved but altered to insert new transparent volumes for a laboratory, exams rooms and floating tea rooms.
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.”