SITE- Reasons for choosing
A - -Area of constant and considerable human traffic
- L -lengthwise directionality offers potential for narrative space.
C-- - Poised at a series of confluences and contradictions (hill and river valley, East Side and the rest of Providence, College vs. City, water and land)
D- - Proximity to water fire.
E - -Proximity to courthouse, which also represents the confluence of city/justice system vs. citizens/public.
F- - -Intangibility, ambiguity between content and context, and disorganization of existing design provides an ideal context for public interaction with the land and the creation of a meaningful place.
G- - RISD! The school, being urban and contained within city buildings, lacks areas where the RISD community can interact with the city at large. A park that functioned as more than a through-way for students and full time residents alike might constitute a perfect place for dialogue and meshing of ideas. The park is surrounded by both RISD buildings and also buildings crucial to the government of Providence (not to mention several historically significant structures, i.e. the old bank building). The providence river delineates a stark boundary between the eastside and downtown, the local and the foreign, students and city dwellers, the well to do and the downtrodden, the world of academia and the rest of Rhode Island. The park I’m choosing forms a large part of the view of the eastside and thus has amazing potential to either bridge the gap between two shores, make it wider, or at least make a comment on the current state of affairs. In a more aesthetic vein, the view of the eastside from downtown is distinctly lovely and full of personality. Can a new, better designed, and more engaging park add to the basic aesthetic potential of this area?
GOALS: To create a dialogue between the designer, the public, and the natural forces within my site. To build in a way that encourages the public to interact with the site in a direct and communal manner, thus establishing meaningful place. To challenge landscape as land-escape, and convert a site which is essentially a bridge into a place of interaction and creation.
THE CREATION OF A POETIC DIALOG
Appropriation, Improvisation, Reinvention
- Site analysis through poetry, form building, drawing
- sampling and pastiche (as related to culture, formal elements, environmental elements). The current design of the park can be seen as an exercise in sampling gone terribly wrong.
- Envisioning new story lines
By changing its stories, or frameworks, a society imagines its futures. In face of urban violence it is possible to imagine a city of conviviality, in which the built environment is determined bypatterns of sociation which accommodate difference, rather than one in which the environmentdetermines the sociation it contains. In the latter case, of course, it is the structures of powerand value through which the built environment takes its particular form which are the determining factors, mediated by decisions of planning and so forth. Imagining a convivial, or sustainable, city entails a reformulation of the aesthetic, or beauty, as something integrated in and expressing the possible fulfilment of everyday life, not something outside it acting like an opiate. – Malcolm Miles, from “Strategies for the convivial city.”
- Creation of spatial relationships based on rhythm, cadence, narrative flow (build up, climax, etc.)
2- Improvisation (Allowing the public and the natural world to do their thing and appropriate the site in their own way)
3- reinvention (resulting from the work of the designer, the results of improvisation, and the resulting dialog)
