Taylor Yard is an old railway yard that is no longer in use. Currently, this vast area of land is abandoned. Together with the concrete-paved river, this stretch of land separated the two neighborhoods on the east and west side of the river: Elysian Valley and Glassel Park.

I feel very strongly about connecting these communities, and utilize the river and this abandoned area as the connecting mechanism. The river’s concrete pavement was broken down, and replaced with a stretch of farmland on the east side, and wetland area on the west side. Various indoor and outdoor pathways connect the two sides of the rivers, and allow the public to have an intimate experience with the river.

The proposed program includes farming, restaurant, education components, gallery, and a bike kitchen to accommodate bikers coming from the bike path that is running along the river’s east bank. There are two ways to access these programs, and to cross the river: via multiple outdoor bridging strands for bikers and pedestrians, or via indoor pathways. The north indoor pathway leads to the bike kitchen, and the restaurant, while the south pathways is itself the gallery that would lead to the library on the 2nd floor of the building.

The site components include the outdoor pathways, farmland, and wetland. On the terrain of farmland, various vegetable will be grown such as beets, kale, lettuces, etc. These produces will be used by restaurants as well as sold in the adjacent market. There are also opportunities for community farmland, in which people from nearby neighborhood could come and grow their own produce in the designated zone of the farms.

The building itself houses four main programs components: the restaurant and the market, the additional farming facilities including green house, farm research lab, chicken coo, and storage area; the education components including a library, a lecture hall, and 2 classroom, and the gallery. The goal is for these programmatic components to interact with each other; to best accommodate the users.