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.  

CR CANstruction

So that takes us up to Friday.  Friday morning was a frenzy of printing and figuring out who should say what, when, etc.  At the charette, we broke into groups and assigned each group a way to look at the church.  One was treating it as an urban ruin, accepting the decay but preserving 'the essence', the next option was preserving the volume of the church space, and the last was to come up with the most efficient division of the space (from a developer profit standpoint) We stayed in the same groups for the North lot, but we were each given a potential client whom we were supposed to keep in mind as we planned.  The clients included a young professional, a family with young children, and an elderly, limited mobility OTR long-time resident.  The charette generated some really great ideas and helped us think about things in some new ways.  Having experienced professionals help us out for the day was great, so the Atelier would like to thank Graham Kalbli, Sari Lehtinen, Jim Knappenberger, Tim Wiley, and David Ross of CR, as well as Doug Hinger of Great Traditions Homes for giving your time to help us at the charette.
After that, we worked at making some cleaner mock-ups of the ideas we generated and we decided that the next week would be spent looking specifically at the North lot, putting the church on the back-burner for a week or so.

Here are some pics of the week, thanks for keeping up with us!

-the Atelier