Re: Design Process: Call for experiences | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Nancy E Wight (wightworld.std.com) | |
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 94 20:45 CST |
Rob asked: > We are looking at hiring the Cohousing Company for the site design for > our second phase. It would be enormously useful to hear your > experiences, good and bad about your design process for your sites. To > get your thinking started: > > 1. What has or is working well? The site "programming" process was absolutely essential. In New View, what I saw happen is that everyone went into programming with their own pre-conceived notion about what the site would look like - how dense the buildings would be, what type of buildings (duplex, single family, etc.), and came out with a plan that really encompassed the whole group. Each group has its own identity and it's crucial that that identity be expressed and developed in the programming phase. If we had gone strictly by THE BOOK, our site plan wouldn't have suited the needs of our community as a whole. > 2. What would you do differently? Come to some agreement AT THE VERY BEGINNING about your values around CARS! Are you going to allow cars to park at their houses? If so, how many? Is there any part of the site that will be off-limits to cars? If so, under what conditions can cars enter the pedestrian zone? These issues affect lots of decisions, especially when you get down to house selection. Of course, if you don't have a pedestrian zone, this isn't as much of an issue. > 3. How well did the process of working with professional designers go > and what advise would you give to someone just starting this? IMHO, we have been extremely fortunate. Our architects possess something that I have not seen in too many others - it's an ability to catch the "feel" of the group, to see which direction we are leaning and help us clarify the needs of the entire group. I don't think they learned this in architecture school - they are just very patient, tuned-in, and committed to doing what's best for us. > 4. What were the gotcha's in your process? The car thing that I mentioned above. We started out by saying that it was OK for a few people to drive up to their house. But when we actually got down to it, many more people wanted to park at their house than we had originally planned for (I think this was largely due to the terrible winter we had last year) and we didn't have a mechanism for saying when enough was enough. We ended up designing more road so that more people could park at their houses. Also, as you probably know, there is no way to know how much your site plan will ultimately cost until it is designed. And only then do you find out that it's too expensive. This happened to us, mainly because we had a reduction in the number of houses we were allowed to have on the site, and all of a sudden we had a site plan that was too expensive for the number of houses allowed. This was complicated and could not have been foreseen at the time, but to the extent you can, it's obviously better to know how many houses you can have sooner than later. > 5. General advise about site design? Something I learned from someone at Nyland at the Boulder conference: make sure you have places for people to SIT if you intend to make a space a gathering place. It's good to have a few benches placed in strategic locations around the site for this purpose. Also, if you can, put the common house in a part of the site that has particularly nice features, such as a good view, lots of sun, a big lawn behind it, etc. Although we don't live there yet, there was sentiment expressed during the programming process that people were more inclined to hang out in and around the common house if it possessed some of these features. - Nancy Nancy Wight wight [at] world.std.com New View Neighborhood Development Acton, MA
- Re: Design Process: Call for experiences, (continued)
- Re: Design Process: Call for experiences School of Mathematics, U of MN, November 11 1994
- Re: Design Process: Call for experiences Stephen Hawthorne, November 11 1994
- Re: Design Process: Call for experiences shedrick coleman, November 11 1994
- Re: Design Process: Call for experiences JoycePlath, November 13 1994
- Re: Design Process: Call for experiences Nancy E Wight, November 15 1994
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