Third Community Meeting

Where's a stadium full of Romans when you need one?

Tonight we held our third meeting with the community, including our transit contact in Asheville, who offered his design affirmations and concerns for the first time. This week's meeting followed a weekend spent combining three project proposals into a single design. In reality television architecture, this design would have survived because it beat out the competition. It would be one of eight designs that, from week to week, modified according to what else was in the running in hopes of brawning over the other proposals.

But at Design Corps, as in other practices and collaborative design-build projects, resolving a design is not a matter of weeding out the inferior. Despite the myth of the starchitect, there is no such thing as a flawless design, if only because the users of space are as diverse as the somewhat 'idiosyncratic' people who dream of its assembly and construction. When designing for a community who must live with the results long after we have all gone back to school, the best design comes together by maintaining ideas that work for that community. And just as every design has its weaknesses, for lack of a better term, every design represents genuine and creative ideas that come from people invested in problem-solving. It is these ideas that, when aligned to the assets and challenges of the community, are maintained and developed into a next step.

This process has happened once already when, working in small groups, we condensed eight idea-rich designs into three. Over the weekend, the entire team gathered and hashed out a single proposal to present to the community. When eight people, especially students, are pitching in to harmonize a single design, there's sure to be debate, hearty discussion, and a little frustration, but our entire team was pleased and encouraged by how well we collaborated over the weekend to produce a design to which the community, as well as city representatives, responded very well tonight. As we head into a week of big decisions--materials and connections, detailing and possibly even site--the team appears comfortable and mutually minded enough to make a strong step into uncertain and inexperienced terrain--constructing our design for real people, in a real community, with real steel, concrete, and probably lexan, and with our real hands and shoulders, and feet (maybe even elbows and wrists). Stay tuned as we hoist the sails.