Urban Design | Hybrid

•

Fall Semester Junior Year 2014 | Urban Design RISD

My sections site was an empty plot of land in front of the Spaulding Center in the Navy Yard of Charlestown Boston. This was a semester long had begun from understanding the needs of the Spaulding Center and the immediate environment. I had approached this project as a hybrid architecture of recreating the wetland that had existed in the area before as well as housing for the outpatients of the Spaulding Rehabilitation Clinic.

throughout the site there are pathways for the patients of Spaulding to use to regain motor skills. I had studied this aspect as well as the important views from the Charlestown Navy Yard has of the rest of Boston.

studying the 4 scales | City Scale - Block Scale - Building Scale - Room Scale
and how they determine what to include in the design

Study of form in plan
Full Panoramic View of views from site and its position on the map

Units within the building
Handicapped Units = Average Units

Unit Plan | Shifting floors indicated

Pathway Study
Site Plan and Elevation

Section of Building

There are major benefits to regenerating wetlands. They support birds and other wildlife that had existed there before and restoring plants like Sweet Flag, Water Plantain, Beach Grass, swamp and butterfly milkweed, Aster divaricatus, New England and Swamp Aster and Marigold among a few would enhance the quality of the area. Other things that restoring the wetland would do to benefit this area would be increasing a higher biological productivity and therefore increasing a food yield. Biodiversity protection, Erosion control, Flood damage reduction, good water quality, as well as having an Aesthetic and recreational quality to the waterfront that Spaulding is tapping into. By doing this, there will be more of a ownership and connectedness to the waterfront by patients so that the importance of the wetland and rehabilitation of it as well as the patients accessing it.

By looking at the rehabilitation of the wetland as a Similiar to roots of native wetland plants like Sweet flag and Milkweed the Structural Roots of this building will hold the wetland together. This is crucial as part of the hybridization because without the buildings strcutre the wetland will have difficulty sustaining or exist at all.