Today the photojournalists presented what they had prepared.

Here’s a sample (not my group; but you get the idea).

It’s a nice opportunity to be working with this class so that as designers, we can see how we’re interpreted by another group and in turn, what that group feels is representative to show the world in order to ‘tell our story.’ These are purely the work of the photo studio after a week and a half. They were with us on our initial super-snowy site visit and have been making the trip up at various times throughout the last few weeks to catch the architecture student in his natural habitat.

The first round of these is somewhat on the news-reel side of things. Restrictions have been loosened, and the second iteration will likely be more fun. Ours may end up being a real-world spoof (post-review confession booth perhaps?).

Urban design studio is pretty frustrating for the architecturally minded. It’s a lot of land to deal with and it’s tough to know exactly where we should put our hands.

It’s also tough, because we’re working in Cleveland: the fastest shrinking city not affected by a natural disaster. It was built for a million people, about 400k now, and expected to drop below that in the next decade. Our project will incorporate changes over the next 50 years.

Most of the students are proposing passive and community oriented features over the 100 acres – parks, small development, bioremediation, institutional research, etc. However, we’re told that the port needs money to finance the move, and the answer to this is MAXIMUM DENSITY. Never mind the current state of Cleveland. Never mind some of the most foreclosure-blighted neighborhoods in the nation. Never mind the mixed use monstrosity that’s supposed to be the ‘hot development’ and will be going in right next to our site. Build the site up and make a buck. (Besides, in 10 years, who’s going to remember that this is new vacancy not old?)

Sure, turning the port only into a huge park may not be the answer. But “we need money = maximum density” is a pretty near sighted statement. In a city that currently suffers from an extremely low density of people (but will hopefully turn around in the next 50 years) when the opportunity comes to have 100+ acres of empty, lakefront, downtown space, it seems pretty irresponsible to only consider the maximum-density-development option.

first rule of the CUDC:
Don’t mention new urbanism.
second rule of the CUDC.
Don’t mention new urbanism.



Also:

Here’s a picture of our model shop!


At the CUDC we have a borrowed foam cutter made from an old jigsaw (free to use!)
50 minutes away in Kent, we have one lasercutter (open only sporadically, 1$ a minute for the first 10 minutes, $0.50 a minute after that…bring your own material – chipboard only!), and a 3D printer ($5 a cubic inch…by appointment with faculty only).
We have no woodshop or metal shop access.