Final Project

Here is the final layout for the Ballard Neighborhood Design Studio. I think it turned out fairly well. Some of the most valuable feedback was the disconnect in ideas between the greenways and the intersection.

On Wednesday we are doing an open house to the community in Ballard. Wish us luck!

LID Enhanced Greenways and Stops as Destinations

Hey guys, today we met with community members of Ballard and bounced some ideas off them on the future of Ballard around a series of Rapid Ride Stops. It was a good experience and it always helps to work with real people to get a sense of real world concerns. I have found myself concerned more and more with the financial side of projects. I was telling my partner today, I dont see a beautiful canopy spread across the intersection, all I see is a giant $ falling crushing the entire project from reality. What I am interested in is rooting out community support and community groups that are already established and working with them to make some of the project cheap, and thus more likely to happen. Because in the end what does it always come down to? Will power and money? Mostly money. Here is a couple photos I took while working in the studio on Sunday for the Monday meeting.
I should mention those green corridors being sketched out are planned to be Low Impact Developement (LID) enhanced greenways, meaning that they share the road with the little vehicular traffic that exists there.

Next we move into the digital stage and further look into funding and areas that we can possible do some rezoning....touchy.
Until next time! :D

A look at Ballard's Transportation System

This week was a busy week indeed. Apologies for the intermittent posting this quarter so far. On Monday we took a field trip to Seattle's Ballard neighborhood and met with some representatives of the community there to talk about some of the outstanding issues in Ballard and some of the qualities as well. What makes Ballard Ballard?

After the meeting we spent the rest of the week compiling data about various areas of focus on the neighborhood. We then presented our "class findings" to those same community representatives and to the rest of the class. With further input from the community we are compiling all the data into a booklet for the class' use for the rest of the studio. Here are the pages that my group made!

In other news, this Friday we had our first UWASLA (University of Washington American Society of Landscape Architecture)meeting of the quarter.We have alot of events planned and I've renewed my commitment to updating the blog for the group that is meant to give prospective applicants to the program a chance to see the type of work we do and the culture of the studio in general. On top of that we are going to have a mentor-mentee meet and greet in a few weeks for those of us who have been paired up with a professional mentor through the department's mentoring program. I must say I am very excited for the whole thing.

Until next time! Hope you all are having a great 3 day weekend, unless you don't get this holiday off. In that case go let off some steam :)

10,000 Views! A New Day.

Hi everyone! Today my blog hit the 10,000 view mark. It's pretty funny, more people come the more you post...and spam your facebook status. Anyways today I'm just going to give a quick update about the NEW quarter so far, some NEW books i'm getting in, and a NEW view on high organization!

So far this quarter I've had a few lectures, just introductions into hydrology and site engineering, site restoration, and two quick studio sessions on neighborhood design. For the site restoration class we are going through a series of different natural ecosystem types and looking at the best ways to go about restoring them from man made disturbances. Unfortunately this has yet to yield any good pictures...Anyways, what I'm finding really interesting about the class is towards the middle of the quarter we are going to start a real life restoration project as a class at Ballard in Seattle. I have no idea how we are breaking up the assignment class-wise yet but it is going to be a new experience for sure. I will keep you guys updated as we go.

Books

So to compliment all these new classes I've purchased some books that are recommended and one that I've been wanting for a while. That book is Mastering Autocad 2012. I feel pretty confident in my basic autocad skills but in terms of advanced use, I am nowhere near where I want to be.

The other books I am still waiting for in the mail are Site Engineering for Landscape Architects,by Steven Strom, Kurt Nathan and Jake Wolandand and also Soil Design Protocols by Timothy A. Craul and Phillip J. Craul. At first I bought these bad boys at the local University bookstore and they seemed rather interesting at first glance. But of course they were a good 50 dollars cheaper on Amazon so I returned them. I'll let you know how they turn out!

Other News

In other news the Fluffy-Muffin website is coming along nicely. We have fixed a few bugs like getting the images not to flicker when you hover over them. We have also been able to get the links to the Facebook Page and the Tumblr and the Twitter all set up so that's good. The biggest thing we are having issues with now is getting enough content up for google to be able to accept our site as legit so we can get advertising up.... hopefully that will happen sooner than later.

Well Until Next time when I have more pictures to show!