This is Churchill Community Garden out west by Churchill High School. It’s a little bare now but in the summer months this place is the sort of unruly, chaotic mess that I envision for The Boys & Girls Club site. The variety of fixtures & depth & disorganization makes for something a kid might really dig. Literally!

a visual precedent

The Best of the Rest!

Process materials, art-wall leitmotif, precedents, & other half-baked ideas\concepts\assertions.

a social precedent

This is Will Allen of Growing Power, Inc. GPI is a urban farm in Milwaukee. It does the following: aquaculture, aquaponics, vermiculture, horticulture, composting, soil reclamation, food distribution, & beekeeping. It partners with the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Milwaukee to teach the kids all these wonderful things.

The general mission is to engage the community through sustainable food education & production. They try to meet the community’s excess need for good, clean food. It’s a very hot ticket. Allen claims the kids, teens, & com-munity enjoy the ownership they feel over their food & helping to grow it, etc. What he’s done has been a model for a lot of these all over the place.

A lot of my thinking for this project was about contrasting a kid/teens life @ school & home with what happens in their off time. That school & home-life, for the potentially troubled sort we’re looking to address here with The B&GC, is highly structured/authoritative & may instill feelings of powerlessness/lack of control. Which these feelings aren’t good & may or may not lead to the child/teen acting out & expressing these feelings of powerlessness in sometimes destructive ways.

So anyway, the point is to offer a place that allows for self-expression & ownership & maybe even provides the opportunity for recklessness in a world that totally freaks out @ even small deviations in “accepted behavior.” Here are art walls as leitmotif throughout the building, dry erase or chalkboard paint or just regular, but open canvases for self-expression. Re-painted when necessary.

doodle walls!

This is some early process work. Thinking about “Rabbit Hole”s, being underground, what that feels like, the transition from potentially harsh, outside reality to this inner something-else, psychological refuge. “The Staged Life” asserted, for me, the need everyone has to hotdog a little, to express oneself. I wanted the space+program to facilitate this sort of self-expression. That rooms are designed as stages & we the actors, a Shakespeare sort of thing. The last one isn’t titled but it’s about how children live in the moment & my trying to recollect that early excitement of there being so many fun things all the time everywhere & how the hardest thing was just choosing.

process materials

digital underlays

characters

early thinking & process

early spatial leanings & models