The education/acculturation center in this scheme has been combined into one gesture with the transit stop.
This singular gesture does much more to reinforce the logic of the rails to which they are adjacent, while at the same time creating a "swoop" that pulls people in off of Broad street and creates a visual connection deep into the site.
At the extreme right of the image is the "market-grocery" which has frontage towards the neighborhood to the rear. Looking at some maps, if you were to live in this neighborhood, the closest grocery is across the river and north (a walking distance of 2-miles). Clearly this is vital to any neighborhood development / relevance.
The houses / retail buildings (perhaps still quite sketchy) are in the foreground. The housing nests atop the retail, and with each having a monitor roof on the third floor which will walk out to a roof garden (and a fantastic view of downtown) they recall the warehouse vernacular of the surrounding area.
The last building is a bit of an economic opportunity maker with the building cut off at the lower Left (Northwest) of the site, which would be a restaurant. Kitchen opportunities are a chance for individuals with limited proficiency in English to make a decent living. Additionally this acts as an outreach to the community, by providing eclectic flair which crosses cultural boundaries.
On a side note:
Playing around with "Virtual Earth" today, trying to get a layer that allows me to draw radii from my site (like google maps but with more sophisticated imagery), when I found this aerial photo of the Franklinton Peninsula:
I think what this photo shows quite clearly, which I have diagrammed before is just how isolated this area is.
This photo is looking North. The site is at the intersection of Broad st (Most major East-West road in the photo), and the West side of the rail viaduct.
With that said and done, I'm ignoring all of the finer points of VE and getting back to the plans and sections.
I want to see ONE summary site analysis diagram that shows at least 10 major characteristics or qualities of the site and its immediate surroundings that are informing your design decisions. Show in graphic form the comments that you describe in text.
ReplyDeleteI am going to try to email a couple of examples, not exemplary but reasonably good examples of the sort of information that needs to be readily available to your critics and to YOU. You have bits and pieces of some of the relevant information in your first two or three posts, but they are not clearly presented in one (or a series of related) diagram.
FYI, some of the images I'm sending are from this site:
http://www.bostonredevelopmentauthority.org/Planning/PlanningInits.asp?action=ViewHood&HoodID=7