Final Review

click to view final board

For the final review, my goal was to develop the central space to my program and show the connections to agriculture and food production, as well as showing a clear building concept, circulation paths and program hierarchy.  The challenge seemed to be tying everything back to the original thesis and showing how my final product related back to my original thesis idea.  With the goal of the thesis being a stronger connection to food production through the presence of agriculture processes in everyday food shopping experiences, I focused in on a central food hall space in which all the pieces of the building converge, to create a space where you can not only buy fresh produce, or locally produced preserves, but are also invited to pick vegetables from the greenhouses above, grab a seasonal meal from the foodstands, and go sit in the orchard to enjoy their meal.  I feel that after finally landing on a concept, going through the development of it helped me to develop my design skills further, but I also think the cycling through ideas was helpful in narrowing down the importance of the various forces guiding the design.

So, where to go from here?

I found that having two sets of reviews gave me much richer feedback than if I had only one.  Both overlapped on some issues, which made it helpful in deciding what feedback to move forward with.  Both sets seemed not entirely convinced that I was supporting my original idea, after conversing with them, I found that it was more in the lack of proper graphic representation rather than the project not entirely supporting my original idea. Not to say that I don’t have design work to do.  I do feel that the connection between the agriculture and the commercial and market spaces is not  strong enough to justify my thesis at this point, so I am trying to clarify what that means in terms of moving forward in the design process.  I plan to work a little over spring break while the comments are still fresh and hopefully be in a good place to start exploring systems and more detail oriented parts of my building come spring term.