sustainable urban community design studio

week THREE, group FOUR - FIRM [grasp]

(Everyone starts their blog entry with "this week..." boring!!!)

It's the third week and FIRM [grasp] is adapting our entry to fit the viewers of the urban community design studio blog readers!(yes, this means you.) To fill in some of the basics...

FIRM [grasp] is made up of architects Tanner McGreevy and Julie Bock and designers Rachel Mosmeyer, Kristen Cole, and Aileen Yang. Our site is in downtown, OKC and located at between 10th & 11h/Harvey & Hudson. Just a couple blocks east of the Plaza Court. The above is our new rendered logo.(Yay!) If you saw it before it was only a black and white sketch.




Our progress this past week for the architects was working with the parking space allotment. We incorporated major parking to the west of our lot and a row of parking to the east on our pickup/drop off side. Additionally, we've constructed a model with a basic site/orientation in mind. Interiors worked on calculating occupancy, prototypical sketches for our focus rooms, and inserting our egress. (mmhmm, finally.)



Our issue last week was our pool feature. "Well, do we recess it?" "How does that work?" "I thought we were going to raise the floor." "No, remember we said that we wanted to ramp into- what?!" Obviously, we were having problems. We've discussed it numerous times since then and figured that we'd just split level our ground floor. We've also addresses more specific materials that we're going to use and also what type of architectural features to use on the exterior.

While presenting our ideas at the critique, we were naturally faced with some issues that we tried to struggled to address and then proceeded to ignore and bypass. But, our company was great! and really helped talk us through some potential solutions. Since this morning, we've done some serious revamping and site arranging so we plan to rework our plans for next week.



The goals of last week were:
-have a finalized floor plan
-finalized site plan
-have volumetrics modeled within the space
We didn't quite meet all of these 100%, we more so covered about 70% of our goal in each department.

Next week will include:
-really, really have a finalized floor plan
-modeled shell of interiors w/ blocks & materials selected
-reworked site plan, addressing parking issues and garden plots
-modeled general exterior w/ materials incorporated