Last few days to Donate!!!

Hey!
For those of you who went to open house you most likely meet Jared Sheehan.  Jared is a soon-to-be Miami grad who will be biking across the US to support affordable housing.  Please support him!

From Jared:
First, you can connect with my trip on facebook "cruising from coast to coast." https://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_166016273443130

Second, if you want to follow my blog it is here:

http://www.travellerspoint.com/member_profile.cfm?user=jsheehan11

If anyone wants to donate, here is the B&B link. TWO IMPORTANT THINGS: 1) they have to put my name in the rider donation box and 2) I have to have the donations in by the 12th (Only 9 more days!!!!!).

http://www.bikeandbuild.org/cms/component/option,com_wrapper/Itemid,118/


Thank you for all who came to the open house...the project is still up in the Center so check it out this summer if you didnt get a chance!

The End is in Sight...

Just as January, February, and March have seemed to flash in front of our eyes, so too has April… but this time faster if that can even be possible!

This month, the Atelier has really dug deep into our plans for the Over-the-Rhine Senior Living facility proposed for the vacant lot at the corner of 15^th and Race Streets.  We have discussed, deciphered, debated, and decided on many things these past few weeks: structure, HVAC systems, elevations, details, façade materials, reflected ceiling plans, window schedules, floor heights, stairs, and the list goes on and on.  We have collectively refined our AutoCAD skills and learned some new tricks along the way.  We have (we think…) successfully conquered our computer failures, DropBox furies, and XRef frenzies.  While working through all of this, we have even conjured up a drawing set for our proposal, with a little help here and there from our friends at CR architecture + design and Steven Schaefer Associates.  A special thanks to Doug Steimle for answering all of our many structural questions and clarifying our confusions.  As we are told, even architects with 30+ years experience don’t understand it all and sometimes need a little explanation. :)

This past week has been a constant refinement and adjustment of our drawing set, as we have printed a few drafts and attacked them with red lines.  As goes the end of every project, the workdays have been very quiet, so says our neighbor David Ross, as we have been diligently AutoCADing away.  We can now even dream in AutoCAD.

These last few days of our 2011 Atelier experience will be a final push to create a completed drawing set for our Over-the-Rhine Senior Living proposal, as well as bringing all of our work together for a showcase at our Open House this Friday, April 29^th.  As our days living here in Over-the-Rhine and working downtown at CR architecture + design come to a close, we want to thank everyone who has contributed their time, talents, and thoughts to our project and our Atelier experience.  We have all learned so much from you all and could never thank you enough!  It has truly been a meaningful learning experience.

-The 2011 Atelier Team

Atelier Open House!

We would like to invite you all to...

We hope to see you there!

How is it April already??

Busy.  Busy.  Busy.  That has been the story of the Atelier for the past few weeks and somehow April happened! 

As senior housing has filled our minds and unseasonably cold weather has filled the air, we have been continually developing and refining our plans for the North Site—what we have started to call “Over-the-Rhine Senior Living.”  We have reconfigured unit plans and placements, shifted elevator shafts, raised and lowered parking, tweaked the entrance, and fiddled with ramps and stairs.  After all of these fine-tuned adjustments, we have decided on a fairly thought-out design for now (that is, of course, until something else changes… J).



Currently, our Over-the-Rhine Senior Living designs consist of a campus of 2 separate, but connected buildings.  On Race Street sits the East facility which is made-up of 47 HUD-202, 1-bedroom units.  This facility is raised from the sidewalk about 3 ½ feet with tuck-under parking that accommodates 27 parking spaces below.  This facility is also physically connected at all levels to the existing historic building located on Race Street.  At the street level, a ramp and several stairs make-up the difference in elevation of the existing building’s first floor level and that of our proposed East facility’s.  The main entrance of the campus is at the west-end of the green space at the corner of 15^th and Races Streets.  On the corner of 15^th and Pleasant Streets sit the West facility which, alternatively, consists of 34 Low Income Tax Credit, 1-bedroom units as well as a 2-bedroom manager’s unit. This facility provides street access to the manager’s unit on the ground level and a physical connection to the East facility on the upper levels.  In all, our designs encompass 81 affordable units.

With all of this in mind, we met with an Otis elevator consultant to discuss details about the number, type, and size of the elevator(s) to place in our designs for our project.  This was a very informative discussion, as we learned about two different types of elevators and how they each physically operate and the requirements that pertain to each.  We collectively decide on a G2S elevator which consists of a traction car with gearless drive motors and cables.

We also pulled out the hardhats and took a trip to one of CR’s current developments in Mariemont for a site visit of Emery Park.  This gave us a good taste of the type of construction that our own project would encompass—concrete structure and parking below grade with wood-framed construction of dwelling units above.  It was good to get out of the office and see first-hand the type of construction we are actually dealing with.



On Friday, none other than April Fool’s Day, was jb’s birthday, so of course we had to celebrate!!  We baked up a cake and decorated our little corner of the office.  Birthday hats were included!  I think we pulled off a pleasant birthday surprise.  Later on we took a tour of Over-the-Rhine’s St. Francis Seraph.  We explored many features of the church and even crawled up into the attic space to see the giant trusses and bell towers.  Check out the pictures!

Amidst all this excitement and commotion we even changed desks at the office along with everyone else in CR’s official “Office Refresh.”  We now have new neighbors and a new view out our windows.  And oddly enough, they put us close to the coffee J







Good News for the North Site!

Sorry for the delay! I know it’s been a while since we filled you in on our development of the North Site. We have been busy developing our idea for Senior housing in Over-the-Rhine, and we almost forgot to share our progress with everyone. Let me fill you in on what we have come up with so far:

After much discussion, we determined that in order to make this project viable, we must come up with a simple solution. We knew we wanted to include HUD 202 and Low Income Tax Credit units into the design, so we split the facility into two buildings. The East building would house the HUD202 units while the West building would house the Low Income Tax Credit units. Where both buildings met near the corner of 15^th and Race Streets would become the main entrance into the facility that incorporates a vehicular drop-off area as well.

Parking was designed to accommodate 28 parking spots tucked under the East building. This required us to create a vehicular entrance that ramps down a full level from 15^th Street. Prior to ramping down, the vehicular entrance doubles as the drop off for the facility.

Keeping to our established goals, we made sure our design maintained the existing 2 buildings on the site. Of those existing buildings, the building on Pleasant Street will be left vacant, while the one on Race Street will absorb many of the community functions for the East building. We also wanted to leave the empty lot on the corner of 15^th and Race Streets open so that it could turn into a primary green space for the residents of the facility. To preserve the scale of Race and Pleasant streets, our new buildings would be limited to 3-4 stories.

Earlier in the week, we assembled schematic plans for the facility. As of now, our design accommodates 46 HUD202 Units and another 30 Low income Tax Credit Units. This puts us right in the established “sweet” spot for assisted living facilities of 75 to 100 units. We urge you to take a look at our plans below. We are looking for community partners who want to make our vision a reality.

Parking Garage Site Plan

Ground Level Site Plan

West Facility Ground Level Plan

West Facility Upper Levels Plan

East Facility Ground Level Plan

East Facility Upper Levels Plan

Both Facilities Upper Levels Plan

Potential Green Space on Upper Level

How do you draw a building you cannot measure?

One of the biggest struggle with working in the church is measurements and understanding what is happening inside the building.  We are not allowed in the church, as currently there are two massive cranes taking new pieces of the church each day.  The condition of the church is not structurally secure, therefore we do not want to risk going inside.  So how do you make drawings?  We counted a lot of bricks... well we did measured what we could and then we used images to fill in the rest. 

We did basic floorplans and elevation AutoCAD drawings, but more interesting was we worked on a SketchUp model.  The space is a huge volume to help us understand that we decided to model it.  Below are some pictures of model of the condition before the cranes started.  Let us know what you think.

We will be posting new construction pictures in a few days so check back!

Hello there, old friend(s)!

We can’t believe we’re almost halfway thru March!! Where, oh where, does the time go?

The past week or so has been very busy for us.  Between spring break (yes, you read that correctly, we had spring break) and helping out at our favorite place, Peaslee, it feels like its still, well… February.

Peaslee has asked us to help out with their new Safety City set up.  It is important for Peaslee to make Safety City long lasting yet effective in teaching the kids the magnitude of safety.  So, channeling our inner child, we came up with a road map template (see image below) that Peaslee will be able to use over and over again. The road map also serves as a drawing template base plan that the little ones can use for coloring or describing what they have learned. 

We also traveled up north to Dayton to meet up with Miami Professor Mary Rogero and visit Urban Krag. Did you know Urban Krag is an old church in the Oregon District that was converted into a Climbing Wall Facility? It is actually the tallest Climbing Wall in the state!! Although the church is about half the size of our church, they could fit a max of twenty-four people on the wall, and needless to say we were inspired to pursue our urban retreat facility in our church. Thanks so much to Urban Krag for giving us the behind the scenes tour, we really appreciate it and had a blast! 

Okay okay, here are some pictures of Urban Krag! You're Welcome!!

Speaking of churches, have you seen what has been happening on ours? The top clock tower of the church is now gone, and the steeple is boarded up.  We aren’t quite sure about the new roofing trusses, they are a bit hard for us to understand.  However, they are bricking back up the sides, so it is nice to see more revitalization efforts instead of old, broken roof trusses being cut down.

Again, thanks for stopping by.  Have a great week!

What could a church be re-used as?

This is the questions was have been working on for the past few weeks, we finally have an answer for you.  We want to turn it into a CLIMBING WALL FACILITY.  It might sound strange at first, but think you need high areas with an open floor plan...which is what a church is.  We have found other churches that use this idea.  We will be working next week on the design, so if you have any input let us know!

Below are links to some other church turned climbing wall facility.

Urban Krag- Dayton, OH

Awesome Wall- Liverpool, England

The moment you've all been waiting for...

… designs!  And, not to mention, we have some awesome construction photos of the renovation of the church roof (we know you’re as excited as we are)!!

We have been quite busy the past couple of weeks, charretting and designing away, sending numerous pieces of trace paper flying.  In our last post we told you about our Friday charrette, where we got our creative juices flowing about the church and the infill site to the north, which we fondly call “NorthSite.” 

Since then, we have been developing and pushing those ideas even further towards a reality.  Regarding NorthSite, we explored ideas ranging from a mixed use development, elderly housing and assisted living, to an urban farm for the community, an anchor site for a Walgreens or market rate townhouses catering to young professionals.  Taking into consideration the ideas presented, and what was essential to the neighborhood and what it needed most, we have decided to pursue elderly housing and assisted living.  Collectively, we feel this is the most needed for the neighborhood and what the neighborhood would benefit the most from. 

Below are a few of the elderly housing and assisted living schemes we have come up with thus far:

And as promised, here are the pictures of the church (below).  As I am sure you are all aware, there has been major construction going on with the church.  The stabilization of the roof has begun, however, we hear the roof was in complete failure, so the big gaps you see are where the stabilization efforts are being made.  And no, that is not a wrecking ball you see, it is a balance weight for the crane.  We are excited to see what will happen in the near future.  

Week 5

Well, we're already on week 5; the time is flying by. 

Tom Dutton has taken to hijacking Miami speakers as they arrive at the Cincinnati airport, and bringing them to speak at the Center for Community Engagement.  Thanks to this, we had a discussion with columnist Leonard Pitts Jr., bright and early Monday morning.  There were representatives from the Atlier, Miami, OTRCH, and the Homeless Coalition.  We talked to him about the effects of the internet and free news sources on the field of newspaper journalism.  He spoke about what the decline in Newspaper journalism has done to the reliability and scope of local newspapers. It brought attention to how things like that can effect the Over the Rhine area.  He also commended the efforts of smaller papers, such as Street Vibes, and discussed the importance of having more than one news source.   After the meeting,  the Atelier group stuck around and worked on tying up some loose ends at Buddy's Place.  We worked in the 4th floor social work office: sanding, hanging blinds, fixing window aprons, and some creative plumbing.  On Tuesday, we had to pretty much hit the ground running to be ready for our charette on Friday with some of our CR associates.   We've pretty much been working on developing our own design ideas.  Most of them relate to the bubble diagram in the last post.  So far, we have a lot of cool ideas for the church, and some kind of vague ideas about what to do with that big North lot.  Graham came over mid-day Wednesday to give us some direction on how to lead a charette.  We spent the rest of the time making some plan and section sets of the church building, and some site diagrams to hang up at the charette.
On Thursday night, there was a CANstruction fundraising event hosted by CR and Quandel Construction.  It was a laid back event where we got a chance to talk to some CR people, as well as a few outside contractors and related professionals.  

Church on Freeman and Findlay

Another church that has recently been adopted through OTR ADOPT is first German Reform Church on Freeman Avenue.  The church was adopted by a group, who have plans to convert it into a restaurant and music venue. Nathaniel Hammitt, a UC student with an interest in Over-the-Rhine, meet the owners and offered to help them with measuring the church out.  I had introduced him to our project, so he took me to the church and we walked around the church.  This church is in much better condition then our church.  It was interesting to see how different each church is, which make reuse a struggle.  If you are interested in participating in helping with the church Sunday, February 13 · 1:00pm - 5:00pm they are asking people to help clean it out. There is a facebook group (http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=138570759540552)  if you are interested or contact us for more information.  I know for sure I will be there and some other Atelier members might join as well.

Week Four

This week was a short week due to weather.  We only worked in the office for a day in a half.  We are starting on schematic designs for the church and the north lot.  We have been thinking about turning the church into a bar, a hotel, apartments, and even a pool.  The challenge with the north site is parking.  We have two existing buildings, but the most efficient parking lot is a 120x180 foot.  There has been a lot of discussion on how do we get the parking to fit, do we get the parking to fit, etc.

Below is the diagram of the ideas we have been thinking about.

 On top of pre-design we meet with Jennifer Walke, from Model Group.  Jennifer worked with the City of Cincinnati and was in charge of the Over-the-Rhine area.  She gave us some insight into the building, as she had been inside many times.  It was nice to hear someone perspective who had been involved in the area for an extended time. She was involved in the clean up from the storm that took the clock tower down.  She has seen many proposals for the building over the years.  She has worked with the city and know the type of funding we could look into for the project.  The most important thing we got from the meeting with her was the desire to save the church.  It is a corner stone in that area and has been a marker for the residents for years.

The site visit to the Banks was interesting to see new development within the city. The Banks is a large development project right next to the Reds Stadium.  It is a mixed use project with retail, offices, and multi-range economic apartments.   We have been focusing on re-use that seeing the potential our infill project on the north site could have.  We walked through a normal apartment, a feature apartment, the retail space, and the parking garage. It was a great experience to see the new proposed city center in the building and design stages. 

 Apartment Views                               The Banks from a distance                Retail Space

Week Three

This week our work was mainly divided into finalizing the submission for the NCARB Competition and continuing to develop our preliminary drawings for the church on 1429 Race Street. After another meeting with CR architecture + design’s marketing group, a few more proofs, and many more tweaks, by Friday, our NCARB submittal boards were finally looking polished enough to be turned in. Now we can begin to devote all of our attention to the Atelier Project.

We were surprised to hear at the beginning of the week that we were in fact going to be able to do a site visit of the 1429 Race St. church on Friday with Brad Rodgers, the structural engineer. We wanted to have our existing conditions drawings of the church as developed as we could for our meeting with Brad. Our tape measures could only reach so high, so we had to rely on counting bricks to draft up the exterior elevations. The interior, however, was still a mystery. Despite getting a hold of more photos showing what has happening inside the church, the lack of information has made it very hard to draft up plan and section drawings, leaving us guessing about many aspects of the building. We were very excited to get to go inside the church and see what was really going on in there. Unfortunately, wisdom prevailed and it was decided that we wouldn’t get access until after the stabilization. Instead, we were able to meet with Brad on Friday at CR architecture + design. He was able to clarify a lot of our questions regarding the layout of the church as well as inform us about the structural condition of the church.

Update: Bridging Broadway Charrette

On Saturday, January 22 Bridging Broadway hosted a community dialogue to examine the impact of the area around the new 20-acre casino site, north of E Court St., between Gilbert Ave. and Reading Rd. This was a sold out event that gathered architects, urban planners, students, and community members, including city council member, Laure Quinlivan.  Stephen Samuels, the president of Bridging Broadway, led us by first introducing the surrounding neighborhood and an assortment of inspirational images. The purpose of this meeting was to come up with a vision or 125 different visions for how the casino will affect the historic neighborhood of Over the Rhine. We had to envision an Over the Rhine that was a home to the casino, the jail, and also residents. After dividing into groups led by an architect and an urban planner, we created collages from cut out magazine images that portrayed how we wanted the site and the surrounding areas to mold together. 

Week Two

NCARB is hosting a competition for Creative Integration of Practice and Education.  We are currently working on submitting boards and a write-up of the 2010 Atelier: The Republic Street Initiative. We have been working on two layout boards and meeting with the marking group at CR architecture+design to help convey the message of the project and to best represent it.  We have been focusing on the hierarchy of the board, the color scheme, and the tag line.  We are trying to get this submittal completed in order to dive into the 2011 Atelier Project. 

This year we are working on an adaptive re-use of 1427/1429 Race Street and an infill on 1505 Race Street Corner.  We have been researching the building and the surrounding area to get an overview of the site.  The building is an 1850’s German Protestant Church located in Over-the-Rhine. It is one block from our apartment building. The main struggle with the project is the lack of information.  We are not permitted to enter the build, therefore we have a limited amount of measurements and images of the inside of the buildings.  We have been contacting local people mainly through twitter and other blogs to help gain as much information about the former church as possible. Architects from CR architecture+design joined us on a site visit to get a feel for the site and to help generate ideas.  The building is in much better condition for being abandoned.  

 

The lack of information as proposed an interesting problem, but one thing we have been working on is taking as many measurements as possible, we have the site plan and a third of the each elevation measured.  We are going to be estimating the rest of the elevations from pictures and using brick heights to fill in the missing information.  The CAGIS has been helpful in getting an idea of the basic site and surrounding information. 

Week 1

After settling into our apartments in Over-the-Rhine, the place we will now call home for the next few months, putting on our dress clothes and trekking through the inches of snow falling after a mishap with the metro, our first week at CR architecture + design began.  Upon brushing the snowy ice out of our hair, we got a short tour of the office and picked out our desks.  That’s right—we all got our own desk in the office… and not a small one either! J  All around our workspace on the 23^rd floor at the corner of Vine and 6^th Streets downtown was a sea of white so thick you couldn’t make out the cityscape.  As the week proceeded on, the view of the city from our desks cleared and the sun even managed to peek through the windows by Friday morning. 

 On our first Friday of working we took a break from the office and went to look at CR’s very own church re-use project just across the river—Corpus Christi Apartments – Newport, KY.  This project was part of a larger Hope VI urban revitalization project for affordable housing in a historic district.  CR worked to keep the exterior and choir loft of this former church and school intact in its original forms while converting the rest of the interior into 20 units of one-bedroom townhouses for senior living.  The spaces created were very impressive, as well as the condition of the 1902 building itself.  Unfortunately, our historic church building is not in as good of shape…  The project was a source for good inspiration and initial excitement about our own project on this side of the river, nevertheless.  Now it’s time to get the creative juices flowing…

Pictures: Roof tiles from original church, original stairs, and View from the apartments

Welcome

Welcome to the Spring 2011 Atelier Program Blog!
We will be working on weekly updates as the projects progresses.  We will be updating photos and ideas throughout the next few months.
Follow our twitter account for a daily update and even facebook for more pictures!