It's interesting how certain projects seem to grow with you. In this post, I will be sharing one of my own projects - working with a volunteer group of young land planners and architects to design a conceptual site plan for a local non-profit organization's Manoa headquarters/scholar dormitory. When I first jumped on-board with this initiative in 2008, my intentions were mainly to find out more about land planning as a potential career. Now two and a half years later, this project has evolved to become more architectural in nature, and although I don't intend to become a planner or an architect, I still find myself learning so much, as concepts taken from the design process of this project are applicable to any type of design field.
OUR PROJECT
Since 2008, a volunteer group from PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc. has been providing pro bono land planning services to local non-profit organization Pua Foundation. Within the past year, the group's task has evolved and been more clearly defined to generate site plan renderings for a new facility, located on Seaview Avenue in Manoa, which will serve as the Foundation's headquarters, as well as provide rental units for visiting scholars to the nearby University of Hawaii; these renderings will ultimately be used as part of marketing materials as the Foundation seeks funding to build this facility.
The challenge for the team is to design a dual-functioning building on a limited space that will also align with the Foundation's mission and deep Hawaiian values. The team will also have to take into account various zoning and topographic restrictions of the site.
OUR DESIGN TEAM
Since the start of the partnership between PBR HAWAII and Pua Foundation, a few more designers have joined the team. Currently the design team consists of the following volunteers:
Tara DePonte, Planner and Landscape Designer at Helber Hastert & Fee Planners
Stevie-Lyn Kim, Administrative Assistant at PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc.
Merrick Patten, D.Arch candidate at University of Hawaii at Manoa
Michael Shibata, Planner at PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc.
Luke Lopaka Williams, Designer and Cultural Architect at RIM Architects
Melanie Wong, Planner at PBR HAWAII & Associates, Inc.
OUR CLIENT - PUA FOUNDATION
The Pua Foundation is a Manoa-based non-profit organization created in 1996 as part of the apology, redress, and reconciliation initiatives of the United Church of Christ and the Hawaiian people for the Church’s complicity in the 1893 overthrow. The mission of the Foundation is to facilitate opportunities for a deeper and clearer understanding of various impacts of the overthrow by engaging community dialogue and encouraging public discourse about reconciling Hawaii's past to its present to build a better future for Hawaii.
One part of Church's redress package was a 8,563 square foot parcel of land located just off University Avenue. The existing building on top that land was once a small church and now serves as the Foundation's headquarters. In 2009, the Foundation decided it would re-build the property and also add rental units for visiting scholars to the nearby University of Hawaii.
OUR PROCESS
Values-Generating Activity with the Foundation Board Members. Before the design team even put pen to paper, we sought to get a clearer understanding of the Foundation's mission and the other important values that would be incorporated into the design of the facility. The team met with the Foundation Board Members to facilitate discussion that would draw out these important values. The outcome of the session were three Hawaiian values of Kipuka (sense of place), Kau hale (community connection), and Puu honua (retreat). Two other non-Hawaiian values would need to also be considered in designing the building - sustainability and economics.
Design Charette with Other Volunteer Designers. To help our team generate creative design ideas for the site, we invited ten (other) designers to a design charette in which each participant was given one hour to draw a site plan, elevations/sections, and vignette(s) of his/her overall concept for the Seaview property. Each plan had to take into account not only the five values that the Board decided on in the previous activity, but also the site's physical, programmatic, and zoning constraints. After the drawing session was complete, each designer had three minutes to present his/her plan to the group and the Board.
In a separate meeting, the design team was able to extract common design elements (such as entryways and views to the outside, site line through building, transitions between/separation of private, semi-private, and public spaces, garden/outdoor areas) that will at a later point be pieced together to form the refined plans.
"What's Their Story?" Future-User Profiling Activity with Foundation Board Members. While the design charette provided more quantitative design information, they now sought to unlock the more qualitative information - the touchy-feely stuff - that would make this facility special and unique to the Foundation and the other future facility "users". Each Board Member Participant was assigned a future-user of the facility (Foundation Staff, Foundation Visitor, Resident Visiting Scholar, "Wild Card" Visitor/Passer-Byer) and using all five senses, was tasked with creating a "day in the life" story of that individual. We wanted to know how the Board ideally envisioned each user to interact with the facility, as well as the other users there.
The outcome of this activity was the drawing out of different design concepts that will be incorporated into the final site plan. Common themes among all four future-users were a feeling of home, calming, openness, food & fellowship, and methods for transformation of the heart. These themes may translate into such design elements as a large entrance and flourier, windows with views to the outside/nature, a larger communal kitchen, etc.
NEXT STEPS
With all the great qualitative and quantitative information collected from these sessions, the design team plans to meet internally to brainstorm and draw various development scenarios for the facility. In approximately one month's time, we will have three alternative site plans for the Foundation Board to review and critique. (During this period, we may also decide to hold a community meeting to present these plans to the Foundation's neighbors in order to hear their comments.) Following that meeting, we will refine the preferred site plan and finalize it for use in the Foundation's marketing materials.
