Progress Images

I was just working today on pushing the garden space a little off center... in order to get it closer to daylight. I think that this also helped me add a few units.
Also in this process I realized that I hadn't yet accounted for the units that were in the second ward type. So I actually have about 800 residential units in each tower. So... 1600 units is getting closer to what I was shooting for.
The research that I have done on density shows that in the denser parts of Manhattan the density is approx. 100 units an acre. I have 32 acres. So I am about 50 units an acre just including what is in the tower. I also have room on the site to put another residential tower... but I still need to consider that.



I have also made adjustments in the plan for vertical circulation in the form of stairs, local and express elevators. That might be jumping ahead a little but... oh well.

Also in this post I have finally included an image of the other garden space. The mass is seperated into wards that are 5 stories tall. There are two different ward configurations. One that has commercial space and residential space on the southwest corner, and then one that has that completely missing, to allow more light into the lower wards garden. So it creates a different feeling in the gardedn that doesn't have any mass to the southwest.

River Front Connection

An arial picture of the river front in Savannah.


Besides using the typical city block, and the garden squares as the central elements to the residential areas. I thought the connection of Savannah to the river is also very important. The one very interesting thing about the river front in Savannah is that there is a row of buildings pretty much at the level of the river, and they sit in front of the bluffs. So you can enter the third floor of a building from the street side, go down two levels, and exit the building on the river side. I am trying to a certain extent to use that relationship to develop the relationship of my site to the river in Columbus.



Obviously, I haven't added any detail to any of these drawings, so the scale is sometimes hard to understand.



One significant problem that I am having is I only have about 1000 units. That only includes the units in the towers. And I haven't done a study on how many units I can get on the riverfront... but the riverfront should mostly be retail oriented. I'm concerned that the density that I am proposing in my thesis, and the density that I have achieved is not quite in sink yet. I in the floor plans I have alot of open, corridor/wasted space... I have been playing with a couple different massing shapes that might become more efficient shapes to achieve a greater density without sacrificing the intent.

Just Workin'

As I start to add things like structure, and other such things. I get more and more disappointed in the final result. With the interior view and the exterior mass. An ugly building doesn't do anybody any good. Especially at this scale. YIKES.




Remember this is where I started. Quite a bit 'airy'r'.

Pieces and Parts

In these images are the building blocks of everything I want on the site. The masses are not set. The placement on the site is not set. This is kind of like a sketch, but... in the computer, and rendered.

The office tower, the two residential towers, and the base that contains, the parking, and services, and shopping and other things.

Interior Garden View

So I decided to go back to the way we did things in the first semester. I mean I hate to admit that I learned anything from Chris Mulvey, but I did. Considering the daylight is so integral to the garden square, I decided to start working on an interior perspective of the garden square. I have an idea of how I think it should look and feel, and if I can get that to work, I think it will be a good stepping stone in how to sculpt the rest of the residential building block around that feeling.




I just started to model the site. So it is just brown... and there isn't anything to this view, but a progess view of where I am based on what I have prepared for the interior view. But through my first semester, I was admonished for not posting more interations of my progress. So... that is what I am doing. I think it is also a good record for me to keep track of where I have been.



OK, gotta go eat some breakfast/lunch/dinner now.

Preliminary Modified Mass

Design Considerations

Daylight is a very important factor in creating comfortable spaces. This is something that was missing from the corridors of Le Corbusier’s Unite design. I am determined to make sure that each space, public or private is lit by natural daylight. As I propose to stack the wards of Savannah vertically, to apply the given dimensions literally would create not only a monstrous building in mass, as I have provided example of, but it would not create the quality of space that I think is necessary to the success of a project like this. It is however important to not just disregard the origin of the context, but begin to manipulate and massage some of the contextual ideas inherent in the precedent.

In this theory it is acceptable to change the dimension of the ward. The quality of the ward that is important to translate vertically, is the proportion. To that end, I propose to reduce the proportion of the ward to two-fifths. The ratio is partly based on translating the tything block into the depth of a typical high rise multi-family residential unit, which in my experience in the field is approximately 32’.

Vertically, the proportion will remain the same. The buildings in a ward are typically between 3 and 5 stories, with the predominant height being 3 stories. If I am stacking wards vertically, with a garden in the middle, how am I going to get light to those gardens, and the rest of the spaces. I will study this through a series of 3d massing models.

Savannah's Ward

The layout of Savannah is based on a typical unit which is called a ward. Each individual ward was originally organized as an urban neighborhood. The neighborhood was intended to have a diversity of uses, from light commercial to residential. A ward is typically 600’ square and is centered on a central open square. The streets that create the boundary of each ward allow traffic to move through the city uninterrupted. The internal streets of the ward are interrupted by the central square, and create a pedestrian friendly scale. Resultantly the ward is divided into 8 blocks. Two large blocks each on the north and south sides of the square, and 2 smaller blocks each on the east and west sides of the square, each of which are further divided by alleys. The large blocks are called tything blocks and were intended to house the residents of the neighborhood. The smaller blocks are called trust blocks and housed the commercial or public uses for the neighborhood.