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.
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