This week we have been hard at work moving forward the design of Reggie’s Home. After a week of design charrettes and model making, we presented to Peter Gluck, Leia Price, and Sam Currie. The conversation focused on the essential aspects of the home: a roof, a bathroom, and a place to spend time outside.
We are exploring the idea that the roof functions as the organizing system for the home below. It could be used to collect rain water as well as provide shade and shelter for the outdoor areas of the home. Although the roof may be slightly bigger than the home it will be the gift for Reggie that could be filled in and inhabited in the future.
Roof scheme
We will be examining strategies that minimize the square footage of the interior rooms and maximize the occupiable exterior spaces.
It’s important that we consider the connection of the home’s exterior with the rest of the site. We have been able to learn a lot about the landscape and how the site is currently used while demolishing the old family home and through deeper site analysis.
Presenting to Peter Gluck, Leia Price, and Sam Currie
Next week we will continue our research on passive systems as well as charrettes of our design.
Hello from Reggie’s Home! In an effort to create a design that fully responds to the conditions of the site we decided to conduct some soil test to determine where the best places to grow Reggie’s desired fruits and vegetables would be. In order to conduct the test we divided our site into three parts: the front of the site, the part where the old family home stood, and the back of the site where Reggie has been cutting down privet. We collected soil from these areas and sent them to Auburn University’s soil testing laboratory to be tested.
Box used to mail soil samples.
We have also been researching the plants Reggie wishes to grow to figure out what type of sun and soil they need, as well as what seasons the crops would be harvested. This research and the soil test results led us to determine the best place for Reggie to have a garden would be the north side of the site. With this information we were able to get a more accurate master plan of the site.
Plant research.
In addition to researching plants available to grow on our site we also continued our research with Earth Tubes, a form of passive heating and cooling. Earth Tubes are essentially buried ventilation ducts that heat or cool the air moving through them because of the constant temperature of the soil. A big question that comes with Earth Tubes is whether or not it will work in our climate due to the humidity. Lucky for us, the Rural Studio Farm Storehouse uses earth tubes in an effort to keep produce at a constant temperature. We have been monitoring the temperature and humidity outside the storehouse and outtake of the Earth Tube to see how effective it is. After a month of recording temperature we discovered a change of temperature from 6-10 degrees. With this information we contacted Adam Pyrek, an Environmental Controls professor from the University of Texas at Austin, to consult whether Earth tubes would be feasible as part of our home design. He encouraged us to continue the research on the temperature and humidity of the storehouse and to keep in mind that Earth Tubes are ideal for keeping a small space at a constant temperature.
Diagram showing how the spaces would be divided using Earth Tubes.
With all this information we will be pushing the design of the home as well as the site as a whole forward!
After our presentation at Soup Roast we decided to take a step back from the house design and consider permaculture in order to get a better understanding of the conditions of the site. Permaculture can be be defined as meeting human needs through ecological and regenerative design.
Soup Roast Presentation
In order to gain a further understanding on what permaculture is and how we can incorporate it into our design we had a rapid flash intro to permaculture taught by our very own Eric Ball. Eric is Rural Studio’s farm manager since 2012 and he holds a Permaculture Design Certificate from Oregon State University, in addition to his BS in Biology and Philosophy from the University of Oregon. In a series of two hour long classes we learned that permaculture is a design strategy that allows one to integrate systems within the design. This gave us the stepping stones to better analyze our site and how all the systems will work together as well as a way to present them to others who don’t know the site as well as we do.
Ashley reading “Practical Permaculture for Home Landscapes, Your community, and the Whole Earth” by Jessi Bloom & Dave Boehnlein
Through this process we developed three site analysis maps: a sector analysis map that documents how energies move through the site (such as noise), a water flow and topography map that shows how water moves through the site, and a microclimate analysis map that clearly documents the areas on our site that different in climate, soil type, and ground conditions. Microclimates can be affected by an area’s aspect, solar orientation, airflow, and vegetation.
Our next steps are to take the information we learned and create a master plan of our site. This will allow us to lay out good patterns for the landscape before we get down to the details.
Zak starting our master plan design
In addition to the permaculture class we built Reggie a composting outhouse before we left Newbern for winter break. We have been researching composting toilets as a part of our design, and this will be a great test run to see if Reggie is comfortable with it. In this dry system, all Reggie has to do is use the bathroom and add sawdust to start the composting process. Composting is not only great in the sense that it will minimize water usage but it also doesn’t smell bad (against popular opinion!) and the humanure can be mixed in with regular compost to be used in a garden.
Diagram from “The Humanure Handbook” by Joseph Jenkins
In order to build the outhouse we re-used a closet mock up from Horseshoe Farm Homes Project as the structure. Once we made adjustments to the closet we collected sawdust from the Breathing Wall Mass Timber Research Project team and put it in a barrel for Reggie to have on site.
Composting toilet behind Reggie’s temporary home
Zak showing how to use the composting toilet
Our next step is to continue research with the soil in our site to determine what areas are better for growing different plants. We also plan to gather data on the temperature and humidity of the earth tube system on the storage house on Morrisette Campus to verify if it would be an effective passive strategy for our design.
Hello from Reggie’s Home team! These past few weeks we have been busy continuing our site analysis while beginning some design iterations. With the help of reviewers: Andrew Berman, Julie Eizenberg, and Hank Koning we have been pushing forward with our design!
After Reggie-fying our case studies we landed upon two schemes, a bar and divided volumes. Each scheme aimed to build the minimal space needed to live in order to be able to maximize the space outside of the home. We also looked at blurring the line between the boundaries of the home. After talking to Andrew Berman, we realized that the bar scheme made the most sense because we would be building less than the divided volumes scheme. The bar scheme would also allow the complexity of the home to come from the way Reggie lives in it and not the architecture. Once we established we would move forward with the bar scheme we sat down and determined exactly what the bar needed to accomplish for Reggie to live the way he wants.
After we created guidelines for what the bar scheme needed to accomplish, we had a couple design charrettes and presented them to Julie Eizenberg and Hank Koning.
The conversation with Julie and Hank allowed us to understand that the building is only one part of our design. We also have to consider how the home will interact with the site. In a way, the SITE is the HOME.
In addition to working in studio on our design charrettes, we have also finished clearing out our site and have begun to conduct a site survey.
Thats all we have for now! Stay tuned for Soup Roast festivities.
Hello from Reggie’s Home team! After demoing the existing structure on our site, the past two weeks we have been sorting the wood from the rest of the construction materials. We have only put the construction materials in the dumpster in order to maximize the used space and have taken the wood off site.
Aerial view of site after demolition
Along with finishing clearing off our site, we have been busy with reviews every Friday. On October 25th we had a review with Ada and Giuseppe from Lot-ek in New York City. Through this presentation our team was given advice on how to present our research and case studies to the scale of our project. They also helped us realized that we needed to start thinking about what Reggie envisions and approach our design in an unconventional way.
Presenting to Lot-ek
For our BIG HALLOWEEN REVIEW we had Marlon Blackwell, Katrina Van Valkenburgh, and Mike Newman come to Newbern. After taking them on a journey from space to Reggie’s property we got a lot of insight on how to begin our design. One of the key factors was to take the concepts of our case studies and apply them to fit Reggie’s needs (Reggie-fy them).
We also had our annual pumpkin carve!
Building our costumes
Presenting for Halloween Reviews
We plan to start our design by looking at Reggie’s desire to live outside and starting our narrative from there.
This week we will get our dumpster off site and finally begin our site survey!! When not on site we will continue to Reggie-fy our case studies and get our design juices flowing.
