Days 3 and 4

After finishing up their work on the first design assignment, Kelly and I took the students back to the Cut to introduce the project. All of the students have previously completed some brief work on the cut and have some experience with the site, which is going to greatly assist them this semester.

This time the students saw the Cut in a barren state. The Cut has been been cleaned and graded per the recent work by CSX to take up all of the abandoned track and railroad ties. In the the process they quickly regraded and scraped the site, clearing away all vegetation. We had a few minutes to talk about the path we choose to get to the Cut and what we thought of our experience as we approached our project site.

We spent the next day at Railroad Park touring the project with the Executive Director, Camille, to get a hands on tour of design application. Camille shared her issues and opportunities that have been discovered during the past year with the designers' material selections, the details of how those objects connect, practical relationships about how the park is used by the public and material selections for those designed spaces. It was an eye opening tour to connect design choices with end users and their associated costs. We ended the day with assigning the next leg of analysis maps the students need to quickly conquer.


This was followed  with a pin up and review of the maps and data collection the following day. The students have made a great start and will be refining their analysis and interpretation of the data throughout their work this semester.


Day 5 gives the students an opportunity to show Kelly and I their first impressions and initial concepts of ideas for the semester leading to Tuesday's first jury with stakeholders.

Day 2!

Day 2... so we can say day one was a success or at least we got through it together. We filled day one with the usual first day of class activities; introductions, syllabus review, rules of the studio and the dorms the students get to stay in this summer. We then dove head first into our first design assignment.

One of the overarching goals of the studio is to introduce the students not only to the urban fabric, but to refine their analytic skills to analyze, review and incorporate art and design into their creative process. In addition we all need to figure where we were going this semester and make sure we were all moving forward together. The student syllabus and their selected readings is here.

The first design project was an exercise to do all of the above. We spent our first day analyzing paintings, then building on that analysis to reproduce and fill in the edges of the painting to imagine the setting it captured and the urban form it described. We took all of our plans and meshed them together into our own unique City of plazas. We filled in our city. What we found were the spaces in between the ones we drew. We found new places that interconnected the plazas we had developed from the art. These new spaces were then each assigned to the students. Everyone was tasked with designing a new pedestrian space. To imagine the context they had invented and to create a space using minimalism.

I think I was nice. We worked for 4 hours together on Monday, then I gave them the evening and the next morning to work their magic getting together at noon on Day 2 to see what they had come up.

What they came up with was an excellent discussion and definition of Minimalism. They defined the objective, built the rules and then tested all of their concepts against it. It was a good day, at least from my perspective. We spent the remainder of the time introducing "The Cut" and began in earnest on our next assignments. Tomorrow is another class, another pinup and review, more discussion, more learning and lot more drawing.

Below is our composite City of Plazas, art analysis, vignette sketches and our definition as we move forward.

Welcome!

Welcome to the Summer 2012 Auburn's Master of Landscape Architecture, Urban Studio. This blog will serve as a place to document and share the work of the studio as well as to interact and engage with the students, instructors, local professionals and and anyone who would like to follow along with the studio. We are excited about getting started and eager to jump into this semester's studio work.

This semester the students will be spending five weeks in Birmingham, living, working and learning about the city while working on a specific design project. This years project will be "The Cut". A four block, existing linear cut in in Downtown Birmingham that once provided rail road access into Downtown. The students will have five weeks to prepare and assemble their vision for how the cut could be designed to serve as a pedestrian connection through an urban environment. The students are providing their ideas and vision to the conversation. A project and conversation that many local professionals have engaged in, along with its current documentation in the Red Rock Ridge & Valley Trail System.

As the weeks progress it is our intent to use this blog as a means of recording the design process and documenting the students' work as we go. The students will be primarily working on their designs for the cut in the studio, but will also be tasked with additional design assignments that will help them through the process and relate to their work.

We are thrilled and excited to get started and look forward to a great semester.

Ben Wieseman