The intention of the project is to create an agricultural community hub spread throughout an entire farm broken down into three buildings. The three buildings are linked by an architectural pathway created and arranged by the existing conditions of the farm, where the feature not only becomes a processional link, but the actual three buildings themselves. Merging the pathway and the buildings is done through monolithic form work where the building and pathway share the same materiality and vernacular. The buildings as well as the path both respond to scaling conditions where the rear approach to the site addresses the human scale architecturally and programmatically while the frontal approach to the site addresses the urban scale through both architecture and program. The human approach is linked to an existing prominent hiking trail, while the urban approach is linked to vehicular circulation, being the highway. The three proposed buildings are direct reactions to three local agricultural study models that inspired the creation of each. For example, the Penn State Agricultural Research center was the inspiration for the proposed public research market, where the model was simply flip flopped and made public open to the community rather than private like Penn State. Programmatically speaking the project responds to the absence of community platforms within State College regarding an architecture that is deeply rooted in the local culture will provide opportunities and destinations tailored to a specific set of the communities characteristics. Architecturally, the buildings will focus on water collection and distribution throughout the farm where the architectural path and buildings will redirect and reallocate rain water and soil water into water depleted soil zones providing further future expansion for the farms vegetation.
Re-Farm: A cafe, a public house, a craft place
Spring 2016
State College, PA / / 15 weeks
Co-designed with Elise Cautley & Ashton Amspacker
Selected to collaborate and present the design narrative for Enivinity Firm