Studio update.....

by Sean Koeting

Welcome back,
It's been about 2 weeks since my last blog post, since then our comprehensive architectural design studio has continued its preliminary investigations of East St. Louis, Illinois. This round of group studies focused on issues specific to East St. Louis: it's history and culture, building typologies, environmental factors, land-uses, transit studies, and figure ground relationships to name a few. Our group findings were then digitally presented to the class as a whole, with the goal being to increases everyone's understanding of the pertinent issues.
My particular group focused its research efforts on classifying the sites surrounding area into specific land-uses diagrams, while creating a variety of figure ground studies to further accentuate these relationships. We began our project by compiling a high resolution map of the area using "bing maps", this image was then brought into CAD where every sidewalk, street, parking lot, building, green space, and relative site feature was tracked over. This CAD working drawing was then taken into Photoshop to create a layered file. This interactive file contained the following layers, 1.city streets, 2.highspeed roadways, 3.railways, 4.sidewalks, 5. buildings, 6.greenspaces, 7.miscellaneous paved areas, 8.gravel covered areas. These eight layers can be displayed individually or in concert in any combination to meet the user's needs in both negative and positive formats. A few examples of these figure ground image combinations are as follows:






Next week’s presentations will look into group preliminary master plan studies along with individual precedent case studies. I look forward to updating you in two weeks with our findings.

Thanks for reading.