somerville public outdoor market & museum
Purpose
The goal for this project was to design a commercial and historical public space that could bring territorial pride and economic opportunities to the Somerville community.
Inspired by Renzo Piano Building Workshop's California Academy of Sciences, I designed a green hilled surface for the outdoor market and a large underground area for the historical museum.
Attributes
Captivity: the site contains a variety of openings that make the user curious about what is on the other side. For example, the green hills on the surface contain small window openings that allow individuals to look through the window and see the interior of the museum. At the same time, individuals in the museum receive natural light and are able to have views of the exterior. Another example is the slightly hidden passageways between both areas. I designed the entrances of these passageways to be small in order to limit individuals' vision of the opposite area.
Organic: Somerville is a multi-cultured neighborhood. In order to connect the community with this public space, I decided to make its structure organic rather than choosing a particular architecture style. Cultural mixes happen organically, and that is what I wanted to symbolize with my design.
Site Analysis
My site analysis had three main focuses: severity of traffic, subway stations' locations and amount of people per block.
The stacked cardboard bars represent the traffic severity of a street.
The strings represent the path the subways take underground, and the carton (T) signs symbolize the subway stations.
The colors yellow, brown and red represent the amount of people per block. A yellow block contains less than 200 individuals, a brown block contains between 200 and 500, and red blocks contain over 500 individuals.
I also interviewed people in the neighborhood to find out their ethnicities and to be aware about their concerns about a possible market being built in the heart of the town. The main concern for most households was traffic becoming worse, which made my analysis rely heavily on the town's traffic movement.
Learnings
This project was the closest one to replicate a real architectural proposal. It involved an existent location I could visit and analyze, which helped with dropping any ideas that were unfitting for the Somerville community. I learned that there can be many site analyses with different focuses. In order to make a successful site analysis, the chosen focuses should be somehow related to one another for the overall coherence of the story being told. I learned that keeping a clear, open mind in the early stages of findings and sketches allowed me to digest newer ideas easier than when sticking to a particular one in the early changes. In the majority of my cases, thoughts during the beginning of the process turn out to be completely different than the final product.
