Thank you for joining us today for my talk Mechanic's Bill 2030. The past, present, and future are one of Atlanta's oldest neighborhoods. This talk is, as Julie mentioned, a sneak peek at the content of my upcoming exhibition, which will be hosted at the LP grant Mansion, which is also the home of the Atlantic Preservation Center. The show, as Julie mentioned, will open on the evening of separate September 2004, and then it will be open two days a week at specific times throughout the fall, and there'll be a couple of other events there as well throughout the fall, so keep your eyes open for that. So during my fellowship, it was okay. During my fellowship at Georgia Tech, my teaching and research had been focused on adaptive reuse and the relationship between history and architecture. My first formal research on the subject on shortly before I arrived here, was a survey of intervention projects into masonry buildings in London were bomb damage from World War Two accelerated a culture of old by new juxtaposition and necessitated that most architects based in London, however, they classify their own practices, deal cheek by jowl with historic context and develop a strategy for doing so. So this is some of that stuff that I had been looking at since before I arrived here, starting with the CAPM Fellowship. I've argued throughout my writing and coursework that this considered mix of old and new fosters a progressive view of history in which the present is not fundamentally different from the past. And we recognize that with our new buildings, we're adding the index of our contemporary culture as a stratum that's neither more nor less important than those from the past in evaluating different strategies for reuse and re-imagined reimagination of history. I return time and again to Svetlana boy, who distinguish between what she calls restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia, where the former is a potentially regressive and fosters a desire to recreate the past. And the latter is progressive and necessitates acknowledgment of the fundamental impossibility recreating the past. So to read this quote to you guys, which I reference probably if you've seen me talk before, you might have seen this quote before. Creative or reflective nostalgia reveals the fantasies of the age. And it isn't those fantasies and potentialities that the future is born. One is nostalgic, not for the past the way it was, but for the past the way it could have been. It is this past perfect that one strives to realize in the future? So this distinction that she makes allows us as architects to talk about nostalgia, feeling, which for so long was taboo, but which so many people across cultures and backgrounds and different professions feel to varying degrees. The other writer that I found most useful in developing a rubric for evaluating intervention strategies is John Ruskin. It was by chance that I ended up writing my first conference paper for a conference celebrating his bicentennial right around the time I was wrapping up the London intervention survey. And I found that it wasn't a huge stretch for me to argue that many of the intervention projects that I showed where arguably rest Guinean in that as opposed to restoration, which Ruskin fiercely opposed. They were honest about their own age and materials and they were bold and their commitment to leaving their contemporary mark. So I adapted this definition of vital intervention from rest guns rubric for vital imitation of past architectures, which according to him, required frankness and audacity. Book based on the rescan bicentennial conference has just been published by CTO books online. Long-awaited conference was quite awhile ago now and it will have its official launch later this month. My chapter in this book focuses on Redskins ideas about life and age as two properties that might add to a materials value and might be leveraged in adaptive reuse. Reuse is, after all, a fundamentally material problem, often merging vastly different tectonic systems and weigh in ways we might not otherwise think to do. And we increasingly hear calls to reuse both smaller scale materials and whole buildings as a way of limiting our carbon footprints as architects, it's to my mind's not a coincidence. The rescan was so interested in the continuum of history and the interconnectedness of lives across centuries. So much so that this whole book argues that he is a uniquely ecological thinker, both for his time and even through to today. And ended at the same time he's considered by many to have delivered the first lecture on climate change, which is a talk from 1884 called the storm cloud of the 19th century. Since I'm currently working on a conference presentation about that and thinking about the connections between kind of rescan, thinking about material reuse at the building scale and ethnic cultural scale, and then actually anxieties about changes in the climate. So these are the ideas and the readings which were foremost in my mind when I arrived at Georgia Tech and the fall of 2019, and I set about to find some good sites for intervention proposals. Just have a first look at our site here. Formally and materially, London is not a bad precedent for Atlanta, even if the ages of the buildings are quite different. Because both cities have a large masonry building stock whose functions are either obsolete or obsolescent. However, by contrast with London were bombed, damage affected almost all neighborhoods in Atlanta and in general in the US, the areas ripe for reuse and redevelopment are often derelict industrial districts, disused for years. Reuse here is almost synonymous with skyrocketing property values, gentrification and displacement. It soon became apparent to me that studying reuse in America goes hand-in-hand with studying gentrification. And that developing a strategy for combating some of the negative effects of gentrification would be nece, necessary in order to pursue these kinds of projects here conscientiously. So when I've shown that slide of interventions by London Architects here in the past, I often have students ask how can they achieve something similar when the buildings they have to work with IE, derelict industrial buildings are similar in Atlanta, are seemingly much more anonymous. And even some students have said mundane. My response is always the same that I am, if anything, more excited by a building that isn't already considered to have a precious history or form. So there are few reasons for that. First of all, and most practically, you can get away with a lot more with a building that isn't on a historic registry. And that people don't already have strong preconceived ideas about. Second, every building has a history and imagining what that might have been, perhaps especially for these more anonymous buildings, is part of the design process. And finally, with these buildings, the question of what has value and what can be adapted as wide open. It's the designer's job to craft a narrative for the building, not only in the presence and in the future, but also in the past and as a continuum across all of those times. The side I'm going to talk about today, a two-block stretch of Whitehall Street, which you can see here between Castle Barry Hill. Use this pointer, which is over here. And mechanics Welch is off to the right. Caught my eye from the first time I saw it when David Mitchell, the then newly appointed director, the Atlantic Preservation Center, drove me around to see some potential sites of interest. David is especially interesting, interested in Mechanic's Bill, which has received much less attention, the castle Berry Hill in the way of both developments and official history. When we drove down Whitehall, we were actually on our way to McDaniel street, which intersects Whitehall right in the middle of the stretch. I don't know if you can see my pointer as a major cross section here or intersection here is with McDaniel street. So we were driving down to see some of his favorite sites that he thought would be interesting to look at and R&D quite interesting on McDaniel streets. So those included a historic barbershop and some unoccupied, smaller commercial buildings and more central mechanic smell than what we're looking at here. But I was immediately fascinated by this whole street of seemingly underused and abandoned buildings and empty lots which are so close to downtown Atlanta. All of Peachtree Street was once called White, was once called Whitehall Street until 1959. We get another view here. And the short stretch that still called Whitehall connects directly to peach tree as well as to Memorial Drive. Whitehall today as an urban island disconnected from its neighbors by the long existing rail lines to the north and by Interstate 20 to the south and east, largely accounting for its apparently underdeveloped state, despite its proximity to downtown. 21st century, White Hall is home to a couple of formerly commercial buildings currently operating as residential lofts. A 100 year old church that was up for sale earlier this year. The bottom left there, a couple of brick building shells, empty lots were buildings had burned down over the years, and a handful of old warehouses which are currently unoccupied or use the storage. And this looks to me like a scene out of a Pixar movie where all the cars are having a meeting. There's a lot of cars on the street. I'll pause here to point out that the work I'll show today, which is includes proposals for most of the EMT and underused lots along Whitehall has a lot of authors. First and foremost, what I'm talking about today, this work originated my spring 2021 senior studio, whose students are listed here. I've also spent the summer editing, redrawing and remodeling their work to bring it up to exhibition readiness. But the design work for all of the projects credited to them is almost entirely their own. This past January, I took part in a symposium of fellows from across architecture schools from all over the country. And the consensus across all fellows was that we have learned the most, the fastest from our students in our courses on our own research topics. And that's certainly been true for me this year. I've also had some really excellent research assistance over the past two years. And the ones whose names are highlighted here played a particularly large role in the workshop today. So a lot of that getting things kind of exhibition ready and new designs as well. David already mentioned has facilitated this work from the outset, helping me find sites, get access to them. And finally, showcasing the work at the Atlantic Preservation Center. I was also super lucky to start at Georgia Tech at the same time as Danielle, who you guys heard from last week and who's helps me out with drone photography as on the previous slides, 3D scans and many, many hours of discussion about that kind of spectrum from preservation to reuse and adaptation. And then finally, I'll touch very briefly on a junior studio I taught this summer that followed up on the White Hall studio and was sited on artisan yards, which is a recently purchased campus at the very end of Whitehall. And that's what this model is up right here. Okay. So mechanics cell as a neighborhood dates back to 870 and it was so named because it was inhabited largely by mechanics who worked on the railroad and in other industries. Historically, it was a prosperous multi-ethnic neighborhood with sizable white, black, and Jewish populations and a mix of working-class and middle-class residents. The demographic shift it over the years, but especially with the construction of the interstates in the mid-twentieth century, which isolated the whole neighborhood. Much has happened with Whitehall itself we saw in previous slide. To give you an idea of how dramatic the introductions of the highways was. Here's a photo of the area from 1949. So look at what you might imagine to be the boundaries of mechanics fell. Here's a photo of today where you can see the area entirely bounded by infrastructure. Today, mechanics will is predominantly African-American and low-income and it's under served by public transit, parks, groceries, and basic retail. It also has high levels of gun violence and other crime. Which along with its fragmentation from its neighbors, has contributed to it slower development by comparison with Castle Barry held to the North or some are held to the East. However, as central Atlanta, as more and more developed, the specter of development and gentrification still loom. Property values are rising and some residents have seen their rents triple or more in the past decade. Many homeowners have left of their own accord because selling is so attractive right now, either way for many reasons, as former mechanics little Civic Association vice president Jason dozer told us, mechanics, They'll has suffered a huge loss and local knowledge and continuity of residents in the past decade, men more. So spring 2021 studio began with a three-week study of the neighborhood to produce a visual history that would form the basis for part of the show this fall, and would also grounds the proposals and an understanding of what the community needs. Jason dozer gave us an initial tour of the neighborhood, and we concluded our three week study with a programming brainstorm with local residents, including to Misha Lester of the urban advocate with the Atlantic Preservation Center and with developers of nearby projects, including Braden Fellman, her redeveloping former Abrams fixture corporation, just immediately southwest of Whitehall Street. And Ronald Battista of eagle environmental construction, which is slated to lead the bioremediation of a heavily polluted Brownfield site at the far end of Whitehall, where they will subsequently build a mixed use development, residential development with about 400 units. If Ronald's project goes according to plan, it will be the first major development on Whitehall and decades after decades of speculation about the potential development of the neighborhood. So one of my requirements was that each student, in addition to the people that we kind of all talks two together, I required each student to identify and talk to at least one additional local stakeholder. And according to them, that was by far the hardest thing, but I ask them to do at least before they did it. It was daunting at first to cold call local business owners, local elementary school principal, tenant association representatives and others. But most of the students came back amazed by how easy it had been to get people to talk to them and excited by all the things they found out that they would otherwise never have learned. That's not to say that a couple of business owners didn't say, We're not interested. But for the most part in people had actually ideas we would never have heard otherwise. So for example, one student who was interested in the scarcity of food for sale and mechanics, They'll called the owner of one of the few local groceries and discovered that she owns those very same old commercial buildings that David Mitchell had been curious about among Daniel and that we had been having a hard time sort of tracking down who owned and that they're currently unused, mainly because she's waiting to rent them out to locally black owned businesses instead of out outside businesses that might be less attuned to the existing community. So meanwhile, I was making my own cold calls to all the local property owners on Whitehall to schedule five different site visits. Unearthing a lot of stuff on my own, among many other things, I learned that the local churches pastor didn't believe there was any chance of reviving the congregation, hence the sale of the church. The business that now houses a dance studio and boxing studio, used to be a US Post Office. The shell building next door was used as a church for many years before the floors were destroyed in a fire. And about half of the buildings along Whitehall were once owned by House parts of business which still sells garden statuary and curtain rods, but which has significantly scale down its operations on Whitehall. Hence, many apparently empty but not entirely abandoned buildings East at McDaniel street. So on the bottom here you have an elevation of everything that's there today. And then these are some images from archival stuff which mostly predates the information that we got just by talking to people. The archival research showed that the street had once been truly an extension of the main street of peach tree with a combination of storefronts, mom and pop shops and diners, and several automotive sales and repair shops. One group of students aren't them. Uh, Chris and Paula identified some existing local landmarks, including the Capitol building in downtown, the former Turner field just across IAT seven and Summer Hill. The local Dunbar elementary school, which we were told serves the most homeless children of any elementary school in the city because of its proximity to downtown shelters. And the city jail Who's decommissioning and reuse has been speculated that has not yet happened. So we were told that the city jail has about 15 percent occupancy. And so there's a lot of talk about it turning into maybe like a wellness center or homeless housing or accounting. Jail was unclear what's going to happen there. And Morehouse, Spelman College's are not called out here, but. Because they're technically not in mechanics. Hello Castle, Barry ****, but they also sit very close to the site, just the other side of Kassel, very ****. Aren't them a crescent? Paula also looked at residential patterns across mechanics of L and found a market difference between South mechanics well, which retains a texture of colorful single-family homes with moderate tree coverage. She can see best in the bottom left photograph. And North mechanics though, which is dominated by a large housing projects centered on a giant parking lot with no mixed-use component and little tree coverage. By contrast, there's relatively little mid-sized mixed family housing, which ended up being one of the programs that most students ended up choosing to include in their proposals. Another group, blending pilot, looked more closely at the history of vegetation in the area and found that while Atlanta as a whole is known for its tree canopy, neighborhood planning unit, NPV, in which mechanics though is located, has some of the least tree coverage of any of the cities neighborhood planning units, and Whitehall Street has less than the rest of mechanics, though. Blended Kyla looked at some changes to specific sites over time and founds that while kudzu and other unplanned vegetation did add more greenery over time. In some areas, especially where buildings no longer SAT plan vegetation and trees declined along this stretch pretty consistently. One of the most cited problems in mechanics They'll buy everyone we spoke to was transportation, difficulty of access to public transport, unfriendliness to pedestrians, especially on Whitehall itself, and lower car ownership compared to other parts of the city. Dana, Heidi, and Shyam looked at the changing relationships between Whitehall and different modes of transport over time. Whitehall in particular feeds into the interstates, which results in a lot of speeding along that stretch, making it very dangerous. There are no crosswalks and no bike lanes. The lighting is poor at night in the sidewalks are small. One of the two Marta stations that serves mechanics well, garnet station is access primarily by walking down this stretch. And most poignantly, Jason dozer showed us how the children coming in from downtown to attends Dunbar elementary school, often walking unintended, have to walk down the stretch to get to school. As illustrated here by Walden Jones for the summer studio. So as a studio, we have a few images here of the trends, transport networks. As a studio, we agree that the current street configuration was extremely inhospitable to residential development and are collected proposal reduces the street with ultimately not to a two lane road is shown here, but to a three lane road with variable direction at different times of day. And the central Lane, which adds at least five feet more buffer between cars and pedestrians. After hearing from local stakeholders about crime levels, Displacement, pedestrian unfriendliness, and so on. It could be a little disheartening and it was important to remind ourselves that we also still have a lot to work with. We aren't just looking back to the past, to a time when the buildings were denser and the programs more buried and community facing, but also in the fabric that remains today. They're constant reminders of mechanics, though. Mechanics bills thriving industrial past. On the west end of Whitehall, there's an active dance studio. While we were there, we saw a street artist painting this women of color neural right here. And we watched her stuff while she ran off to use the facilities at the Shell station, which is a surprising hub of activity. We did not suggest replacing it. There's a lot going on there on this collage, Chris Aren't them on? Paula also highlighted two of the developments that are imagined at the east end of Whitehall. Ronald, but tastes Brownfield projects and artisan yards, which was rezoned and sold in January 2021 with a memorandum including these renderings of twin 50 story towers. That's what you see at the far right there. So that is there's no residential density there now and that's a potential density that could be built up. Over the summer. My junior studio heard that the current so we are our studio was cited all along artisan yards. So we heard from the current owners of artisan yards that they're working to re-imagine it as a high-rise smart campus in the middle of it, Lana with its own digital currency. Which for them means that they'd be taking advantage of its currently isolated site. But then they would ultimately their, their ideas that they would ultimately reconnect all of the surrounding Fab fragments with new technologies. Although we're thinking at a more modest scale for the White Hall studio, we found a lot to cue off of and amplify about the existing street and neighborhood, as well as adding amenities which are currently missing. So for the purposes of the studio, I divided Whitehall into a number of sites for potential development, leaving alone most of the buildings we deems to be fully operating at their current scale, including the Shell station, to loft buildings on the corner of Whitehall and McDaniel as stable for horse-drawn carriages where they give tours, cubes, part a cube smart storage facility, and a couple of small properties that are owned by individuals. All of the sites labeled one were included in the first phase of design, I e the spring studio. She's the primary stuff I'm going to talk about today. My intent was that each pair of students would work on one site with an empty lot in an existing building for alteration so that we would average one building per student. But each student would have to think about the interplay between reuse and ground up construction. We found almost immediately, as Julie referenced was that the distinction between new build and reuse is rarely so clear cut. Especially here. Sites that appear to be empty have the foundations of older buildings, have footprints of buildings that had burned down can be seen in archival photographs have hosted a scale of development we would like to rekindle and so on. Even the dirt holds the traces of its history as in the site that Ronald Battista is planning to spend $19 million by remediating, by hauling the poison soil offsite, cleaning it, and replacing it. Two sites marked here didn't have the parameters I wanted for the studio sites, so I reserve them for my own designs after the studio was done and then taking into consideration the student's proposals. So that's largely what I've been working on most recently. Beginning with phase 1, we will start with Chris and Arthur, ma, at the end of Whitehall here, Chris and erythema one, the capstone Prize for Architecture for their proposal for the Westeros site on Whitehall Street, including the building which was once a US post office and now houses the rib must Studios, which is a dance studio. Earlier this year, Meredith, the owner of rhythm a, purchase the building where she also lives. So that makes it one of the few buildings that's owned and lived in by local. In our research phase, we learned that mechanics well as a food desert and we were cautioned by Jimmy show Lester among others, against trying to solve that problem entirely pride providing urban farms or groceries, since many people don't prepare their own food and would need some training and long-term changes and habits to do so. Christian art them and knew from the beginning that they wanted to provide prepared foods. As well as building upon the existing performance programs in the building, including the dance studio or boxing studio and a recording studio. And improving upon the existing housing, which is converted from the old post office and has few windows. As you can see here. We didn't actually have access to the residences and we couldn't even figure out how most of them got light. But they must, I'm sure they do. Chris in Arthur Miller was surprised to discover that this building has such a vibrant public life because it's face to Whitehall Street appears almost as the back of the building, which makes sense in the context of a post office that was largely designed to face the rail line. But it isn't ideal for a public facing building today. They're collages of the facade before and after illustrate their overarching design concept, which was to amplify what they already found interesting about the building. It's collage like aspect with multiple seams and misalignments. They reinterpreted and recombined existing features of the building. Windows punched in the walls of the post office when it was converted. Glass block that was added in the 80s, multiple sizes and colors. A brick and a ramp that runs from the Whitehall Street entrance to the roof of the building. And they also added in some new features inspired by the contexts including pops of color taken from the houses and South mechanics They'll and exposed steel members mimicking this defunct slab lifting crane that still sits across the railroad on the former site of Atlanta marble. So it's very visible from the site. Chris on artha might use models is designed tools to calibrate the appropriate level of collage, a mix that would read as intentional and not chaotic. And then they ultimately models to show the, to showcase their final approach. In terms of programming, the buildings divisions are clear than its material divisions. The existing performance focused retail complex remains on the west end of the building. I can get this to work. Yeah. So that's the performance area, approximately where it currently sits, and an added rooftop venue and the black box theater at the back of the building. The central bay becomes a market with minimally size food stalls and outdoor seating inside the building shell. And to the east and new purpose-built housing complex with 18 units replaces the eight units displaced from the existing building. This is their plan. Also you can see the kind of three parts. So architects claims to combat gentrification with their designs should always be taken with a grain of salt. As many of the potential solutions to displacement are primarily based in policy and decisions by developers. But in this studio we tried to parse out what I call architect problems versus developer problems, or at least conversations architects might brooch with developers. For example, Chris and aren't them a learned the importance of word choice and its implications early on when they were proposing a food hall with generously sized stalls and reviewers throughout that period. And the term PEP, challenging this proposal, a suspect in the context of combating gentrification. So this led to a discussion of market types that are and aren't in tune with their communities and how stalls could be designed and pack as efficiently as possible to allow small vendors to sell their while developers would still make a profit. So that's one thing we talked about in this studio is really thinking about how you would make this desirable to a developer. So it's not non-profit for the most part. Likewise, rather than proposed nominally affordable housing, Chris and erythema proposed very diverse unit types, as you can see on the right there. And very different sizes which would effectively create naturally occurring affordable housing and at least a mix of different resident. Types, instead of relying on vouchers and things that might or might not happen down the road. This rendering shows the view from the housing back towards the food hall. One thing I encourage all students to do is to find some of the idiosyncrasies of the existing buildings that come with their original programs. But perhaps point to new possibilities in the buildings, new iterations. And Chris and aren't them as case that element was the ramp from the original US Postal Service building, which they expanded along with the building expansion to provide access to all the parts of the building. And you can see it there clearly in red. The ramp also serves to create a little bit of separation between the residential and public programming, as you see it in this image, dividing the residents from the food hall. From the White Hall facing southwest corner of the building, the ramp provides the welcoming public entrance with the building currently lacks Kristen, aren't them? I also noticed that the southwest corner of the building right under the dance dance sign wasn't particularly bad condition and would probably have to be replaced one way or the other. That's the kind of thing that we might not worry too much about in studio, but it made them think about adding a feature there that echoes the ad hoc glass block on the shell building catches attention and allows some of the vibrancy of the existing program to show through to the street which is currently not seen. So I immediately east of that, the site chosen by Heidi and Kyla currently holds an empty building that was once a showroom. See that here. Plus a lot of vacant land where several similar buildings once stood, almost all wall to wall and I believe burned down. Heidi and Kyla. We're interested in tackling the lack of greenery and fresh food, but we're warned by dementia that previous attempts at urban gardens and mechanics, They'll had failed because no one wanted to maintain them, which is a frequent problem with such proposals. Therefore, they proposed to make the urban farm a commercial enterprise that would have to be kept up an order to produce food for sale, meaning that access to it would also need to be controlled. Ultimately, Heidi and Kyla propose a new grocery with a productive rooftop garden plus a new residential building and an open green plaza. The resulting volumes are not identical, but they do echo each other. Well as the existing loft building at the quarter shown there in gray. Although the density of the new complex is lower than we saw in the aerials from 1949, which I showed earlier. It significantly increases density and activity on the site from what it currently is, while maintaining one of the few arguably nice consequences of disuse in the area, open space, which is increasingly rare in the middle of the city. By echoing the dimensions of the existing buildings. Heidi and Kylo strategy results in a contextually appropriate scale up, increasing density while maintaining recognizable feature scale and rhythm of open to closed space. Proposal also explicitly tackles the ongoing reuse of natural resources. In this case, harvested rainwater used for the farm, which you can see in their diagrams. The plan reveals that the exposed structure of the two buildings are also echoes of each other. The grocery and light frame, steel and the housing and heavy timber that goes along with a biophilic palette used throughout the residential building. While the buildings are loosely symmetrical with each other, the asymmetric yard between them reflects the asymmetric programming with more privacy, protecting tree coverage on the housing side and more hard scape for farmers markets and food trucks on the grocery side. Throughout this studio and in my own proposals and phase two, I encourage use of the elevation as a design tool in approximately equal measure to plan and section. In my experience, this has been controversial just in the past because it might promote facadism. That's what I was told as a student. Or the assumption that a building has a front that is flat. However, I find it to be a very useful tool, especially when dealing with existing buildings and when considering a buildings urban impact on a site like this, most people who experienced the building may never enter it. But what it looks like from the outside may stay with them all the same. This becomes extremely important when considering what the outside of the building conveys about an approach to history or historic objects. The work on the facades here, and by facades I simply mean what seen from the street. Led Heidi and Kyla away from the idea of a new volume that sits either perfectly on or perfectly in the brick building. Instead, the new volume on the grocery side appears to interlock with the pre-existing building. So there's not as clear a hierarchy. The new volume has its own lightweight structure that holds up the farm and catwalks and does not bear directly on the brick structure is seen in its section. Both the elevation and the section also show the incremental contextual scaling up of the new construction with respect to its originating twin. So you can see that housing behind just slightly bigger. Each building is clad in a slightly different version of a vegetated screen that provide shade and recreates the feeling of a taller tree canopy is rendering show I've two here. The first one we see a view out through the screen on the housing side to the grocery in the greenhouses. And then we have the reciprocal echoed view back towards the housing from one of the greenhouses. Alright, moving on. Cody, Paula and Maya were are one group of three. And they consequently took on the largest and most divisible site stretching from the northeast corner site at Whitehall and McDaniel. See there to the main manufacturing facility of house parts in the middle. To an unused building that was once an auto repair shop. The trio were tasked with creating a mini master plan for themselves, while also operating somewhat independently with these different sites. They determined that along this stretch of Whitehall, the back sides of the buildings are on grade with the train tracks. And there might one day be pedestrian and bike paths between the buildings and the tracks, especially if the tracks are ever decommissioned. As it stands now, a train passes by every 30 minutes to an hour and there's little there's very little keeping pedestrians off the tracks. Ultimately, Cody, Paula, and Maya proposed a fledgling rail trail and posited that this meant the train facing sides of the buildings were as much they're France as the White Hall facing sites where the history of house parts, which we can see the inside of on the top right there, is central to the history and see if I have a picture of it here. No, I don't. The history of how Sparks is central to the history of Whitehall since the 1980s as the business once accounted for most of the operations on Whitehall, east of McDaniel street. The main building predates House parts and dates back to at least the 1940s. Site visit revealed floors packed wall to wall with plaster casts, rabbit sarcophagi, Thomas Jefferson busts, replicas of Michelangelo's David Darth Vader and more. The students is a very interesting and very surprising site because the students decided that the house parts facility and it's next door shell building would be enhanced as a recognizable anchor for Whitehall. In my prompt, I strongly encourage, so this is on me. I strongly encourage demolition and replacement of the corner building. The only instance of building scale demolition and the set of proposals and are encouraged replacement of it was something that would reactivate this potentially major crossroad. All of these three projects focus on material life cycles in one way or another. Or I might say the conservation of mass, starting with Maya's proposal at the corner, which is the project the least like a traditional building a whole lot. So we see that one here. I encourage all the students to use reuse and preexisting walls as an excuse to more indoor outdoor conditions and test the limits of what could be done in a space that is enclosed but not fully conditioned or fully screen from the elements. Maya proposed a crafting studio where artisans from House parts could teach their skills paired with an Internet cafe and hotspot that would increase internet access for residents. Only the parts which absolutely needed conditioning, the drying room and server room or fully conditions while the rest of the building is enclosed in a combination of bamboo and Gabi in laws filled with the bricks were around Whitehall that couldn't be re-used as bricks. So we have conversations like, surely a bathroom needs to be fully conditions. Now why would it need to be? So we'll talk about sort of what are all the different zones that might need different things. Both of these materials, the Gabi in with the brick filling in the bamboo, are easily reconfigured and not read as fully permanent. Bamboo also grows on the site as a reminder of the cycling of the material and potentially even as a source for some of the building parts. The pocket park here allows the new building to pull away from and further reveal the existing west wall House parts which has a visible patchwork and is still inscribed with the faded signs of the Maryland Baking Company, which was there before House parts. Maya found the requisite facade studies useful in thinking about all four sides of her project. The Whitehall facing side, take some of its form and scale from the pre-existing mom and pop shops that have since been demolished. Other faces to varying degrees reflects that face and the face isn't rhythms of adjacent buildings. Most of the materials are at least partially transparent and the result is part building and part ghost. Cody's proposal for the house parts facility in the shell next door includes Micro lofts above the ground level restaurant. So you don't see the micro lost in this plan. You see the restaurant, but they're Microsoft's and a basement level Gallery for the adjacent casting studio that we saw on my Maya's project. There are slightly larger apartments in a building that sits inside of that shell building, which also creates an enclosed garden. And then finally on the right, on the eastern most part of the site, there's a rest stock which serves as an extension of the bus stop. And that already exists there. And it relieves the Shell station of its unofficial role as public restroom, which like everyone knows about apparently around there. The micro loss, which aren't shown here, are truly micro on a scale seen in Japan and parts of Europe, but extremely rare in the US. The other hand, because of the large amounts of public and semi-public space in the building, it's hard to imagine these as truly affordable units, but the idea of challenging Americans to reconsider their assumptions of requisite private space and functions that might be performed in communal space is itself a potential antidote to the traditional patterns of development that set displacement in motion. Cody's material palette paired pillow ET at the panels with the existing masonry, emphasizing the juxtaposition of new technologies and aesthetics with older context. The existing enclosed building is treated primarily by subtraction with two large atria punched through and the facade largely hollowed out to bring more light into the building score and basement. Building shell is partially filled out with an addition clad and the emphatically contemporary ETFs panels while the public restroom isn't entirely new pavilion. And all of these have significant frontage on both sides is reflected in the dual facades. With pre-existing context. It was really interesting to see where each student, the GAN, and what about the existing was provocative to them? For cody, it was this experience inside of the shell whose floor unexpectedly sits at basement level, a full 10 feet below grade. You have to look up to look at the windows and experience that led Cody to call this Atlanta's version of the Colosseum. But I told him, don't say that's any Italians. Okay. Then finally, a betrayal. We are Paula's project proposal, what she called src, which includes a daycare and a community center side-by-side with loft style housing on top of a small retail complex. The retail us focused on encouraging a cyclical economy, was shop specializing and resale and repair, plus a library of things. Most of this project is new construction with the preexisting automotive garage acting as a hinge between the two sides and providing some flex space for the community center. Her formal strategy allows for the coexistence of several different programs and close proximity, while still providing some privacy and security for the school playground and separation from the retail as each part of the complex has a different focus. This render shows the view from the rooftop garden back towards the pre-existing building and the new residential building, and emphasizes Paula's interests and visually overlapping but spatially separate programming. All right. Dana and Cheyenne were tasked with another diverse site, this time on the south side of Whitehall. This site is home to the true faith church, which is approximately a 100 years old, but currently for sale and with little to no congregation according to the pastor immediately west of the church, it's a nondescript masonry building, currently home to a dog kennel. East of the church is a dead end street which predates the interstate. A large empty lot in a warehouse in use by house parties. Dana in Cheyenne chose to propose elderly housing for the growing aging population and Mechanic's Bill, many of whom have been or are at risk of being displaced. They wanted the elderly housing to be visible and integrated into the community. To this end, they proposed to revitalize the church while also adding a recording studio and its basement and developing a community center focused on the elderly residents in the small building next to the church. They proposed to introduce a basketball court and public gardens to encourage at least visual interaction between the residents and other community members. At the same time, to provide the residents privacy. They use the open space to separate the residential and social poles of the project. And they built most of the residential building up from the existing warehouse. I'm keeping it at a distance from the street. So you see all that strategy here. The primary formal move here is simple and effective. You guys may have noticed on the intro slides to each of these, I have like a single term that kind of defines the strategy for them. I chose lasso, but we had some other terms for it as well. There connect the whole complex with a walkable roof that varies in width between something that's primarily a walkway and something that's more like a floating plaza. The columns of the structures also serve to reinforce the division between the street side and the more private residential side. Again, designing an elevation, they developed a strategy for distinguishing between the existing warehouse and its vertical extension. Maybe a little bit hard to see in this image. They use a mix of re-used bricks from the site and then gray bio cement bricks. The elevation studies helps them to develop their interplay. In particular, as you can see on the right there, between the church and its adjacent building. So viewed from flat on from the front, the face of the new building appears, or newly clad building. The face appears as an extension of the church. But it's revealed from other angles to the out-of-plane with the church front creating an entrance to the community center via an atrium like space between it and the church. Do you see that just in the distance there? At a time when the city is losing many of its older churches, especially in black neighborhoods. Dana in Cheyenne scheme is designed to bring vibrancy back to the church and reactivated as a community center. So there's also that recording studio in the basement. Okay, finally, Torreon blend scheme sits on the eastern most site, including both ronald Battista property, a former silver silver plating site in need of extensive bioremediation. And one of the buildings on artisan yards are currently empty, brick-faced warehouse that dates back to the 1980s. The project began with two simultaneous visceral reactions to two of the most common conditions of industrial aftermath, poison or on a vacant warehouse shell. The reaction to the Brownfield site was to remove the soil and then instead of replacing it after cleaning, to maintain the excavation and allow the building to be a scar or reminder of the implications of traditional industry. The reaction to the Shah was to build up from it to create density while retaining the buildings recognizable Street Identity with a parasite structure that could support significantly more weight. And acknowledges the difference in roles of the original building and the new one. The sunken building houses a work training institute that's on the left here. And it's paired with a fido remediating sunflower garden. Sunflowers because they're both native to Georgia and good at filtering out most of the minerals contaminating this particular soil. I gave this project as an example just today in my studio of one of the few cases that I can think of where a student trying to actually figure out what to plant on a site really drove the design forward. So it ends up with a sunflower garden that would be an attractor. The parasite building includes a hands-on construction training facility on its ground floor and housing above. The facility is designed for the construction of Tiny Homes which moved through the facilities workshops on tracks with one word, with one workshop devoted to each of its basic systems, equivalent to the systems in a larger house. Above the housing is based on those tiny home proportions and is a mix of low-income scaled housing and even more pared down housing for the formerly homeless with the two halves of the building separated physically but not visually by V-shaped atrium. A V also structures the main institute building, both above and below ground. One of the material hypotheses of this building is that some of the earth treated off site could be brought back as rammed earth. A likely untested but provocative thought. Here's a closer look at that section and a view of the sunflower garden. So in the exhibition there'll be a 16 foot model of Whitehall, including all of these projects. Still working on those, but we're getting there. I thought I'd share a teaser of this one since I finished it about two weeks ago. And at the time, I consider it my modelling masterpiece by making a lot of models. So getting better with everyone. So I've now finishing up the models for phase two and I anticipate that they will be my new personal best. And I have a new principle that every model that you make should be your new personal best. I will do very quick preview of the face two projects which are all in the final stages of representation and they responds to the work presented up to this point. So I don't think I could have programmed these without having gone through the studio. One of the things lacking throughout Mechanic's Bill is local retail and outlets for community members to get small businesses off the ground. Two of the phase two projects which sit opposite each other across Whitehall, provide a few different kinds of shops. The first, which I'm calling just Whitehall shops North or the shops a white hole North converts this long and narrow building here into a series of small-scale studio style shops, which are oriented perpendicular to what's understood to be the buildings current axis. That is, they punch into this existing west face. I have proposed an environmentally enclosed and conditioned extension to the east east half of the building? I can't I really can't tell what the pointer is going. Sorry guys. Which would house a couple of larger shops on the ground floor and then smaller offices and studio spaces above the existing building would be left unconditioned and treat it as a sort of garage for the smaller studio storefronts, which are moved throughout the day on tracks and could be built mostly offsite and then replaced as needed over time. These would roll back in and be locked up overnight and rolled out as appropriate during the day, I had proposed a cross-walk also, actually approximately where that car is in this image, you can see it in the plan. A crosswalk to connect the retail complex is on either side of Whitehall, since that is one thing that we definitely notice needs to be implemented somewhere. You'll see, and these base two projects that I practice, what I preach, all of these projects already have elevations which I developed in tandem with the plans in these projects, the elevations rarely particularly help to determine the scale of materials, as did the models which also came early in the process. The corrugated metal, for example. We see that best here, is actually significantly larger scale than an actual shipping container and should read as a new material only inspired by the recognizable industrial material. Here the exterior existing wall becomes an interior wall for the addition building that's environmentally and clothes. And so on this side the wall is left as on punctured as possible in contrast to the west wall, the site I allotted for the Whitehall shop south already contains two buildings. One is currently disused, but appears to have been a grocery or convenience store at 1. That's the one on the left. While the other is currently operating as a facility for House parts. While the photos of 426 that's on the left in particular show some of the problems presented by these buildings and others along this stretch. There was at least one major feature of each of these buildings that immediately stood out to my research assistants, Hoff's system in and me. At 426, we didn't expect this modest building to have a full basement from looking at it from street. But it does. And they're these like big indentations into the walls which you see some of these, these photos that were likely pizza ovens but look like catacomb niches. Very dramatic. While most of the structure doesn't look particularly robust or provocative. And there's all these like mix, mixed and matched columns. The basement is intact and I wanted to reveal its drama to the street. At 438, there's a corrugated metal lean to that. We see on the bottom right here at the back that currently serves as a small expansion of the space for storage of busts and other stuff in this space immediately registered is actually quite nice to all of us, both for its ventilation and it's lighting. The semi condition lean too, became a jumping off point for thinking about how to add onto these spaces. I think of this complex is a collection of various shops which might be more like small flagships where street facing store fronts are desirable, as well as a more enclosed, bizarre style collection of stalls. On the more interior portion. Whereas Dana and she hands project unified, unified several disparate elements by introducing a leveling data of the walkable roof. In this project, I might say that the aesthetic material similarities of all of the introduced major volumes are what tie the multiple pieces together as one. And just, okay, so here we see it in plan that this kind of central area, if this is working yet, the central areas where I'm thinking it would be more like bizarre style. And then there are some areas, some, some pieces that are more like showcase shops. And both of the preexisting buildings, which you see here. And then at the top right, they both have a kind of building within building scenario, inside of them creating multiple layers of enclosure and differently environmentally enclosed spaces. And we see justice previewed these. So working on the representation, but to give you an idea, this isn't that smaller building were at grade, but we can look down into the building in a way that you currently cannot. And then there's a kind of building inside of a building over here opposite the new build. Finally, one of the main things that was lacking in the student's proposals and people bring this up every time they see them. This is by my design was parking. I chose not to require parking with the idea that we can more efficiently centralized parking for all of the small residential complexes as well as shops and other public programming. We decided to design a parking garage that both could be converted in future. It private cars are phased out, as many architects keep predicting and never seems to happen. And they can also serve as a park that would become an attractor for Whitehall was something that people would actually really want to come from a distance to. This site sits between the cube smart storage facility to its west and the existing brick house sloughs parking lot, which would be converted to feed into the garage. Unlike many parking garages, this one has flat floors to allow for later conversion. Garage mimics and slightly builds upon the skill of the cube smart and his clad and display boxes that feature the works of house parts and potentially other local artists. Following the model of Turner field. The idea here is that part of the revenue generated by parking would be given back to the local artisans whose work is shown here. The park also includes a sort of highway overpass that partially shades the pool and helps to divide it up into different zones. So just another little preview here. Maybe this convinces you that you'd like to see them under a parking lot? I think it does. But you know that students kept telling me during I kept saying, Oh, Someone's got to design a swimming pool. And he kept saying, Oh, you're crazy, nobody does public swimming, but I think that they showed Iowa public swimming. So all of these projects will be featured in the show at the Atlanta Preservation Center opening September 24th. And I'll lecture in more detail on the face two projects later in October at the APC. So lookout for an exact date to be announced soon. At that time. I will also speak more about the summer studio. Look at the model of here that ventured into artisan yards, not going to show any of this work today other than what we just see in the models. But is, was a pretty fascinating site. Some of our reviewers who came in for mid reviews called it an urban wasteland and an impossible site and the hardest university students be asked to deal with. I thought it was super interesting and the students did a great job of tackling it. So while the current owners who gave us a fantastic tour of the site are planning to build a high-rise, large-scale smart development. I tasks the students with smaller scale mixed use developments, including some degree of reuse, either of a building facade, a whole building, or a structural grid, which that there are four options with students. One of the structural grids is actually something that could support has been, it's a building that's been there for a long time and could support more levels of development. And one is more of a kind of organizing data for the site, but is not taken as something that is structural in and of itself. I brought the model here just to give you a preview of the work and to celebrate the return of physical models, which I got very excited about, that I'd like you to come up and look at it if you haven't already after the Q and a, just to kind of like wrap up words with these two studios behind me. I still don't have the answer to how to mitigate the close relationship between reuse and gentrification in the American context. But I do understand more than I did going in. A close reading of the context and talking with the community are both key. As is a clear delineation of architect problems. What we can actually encourage or change with things that are built as opposed to relying on policies coming into play down the line. Limiting unit sizes, moderating expectations of space and amenities, and increasing density could all help reduce displacement. I ask the question of how to mitigate gentrification to all of the developers and several of the community members with whom we spoke. Most of the community members said some version of no Starbucks. And they were really like not choking. It was very urgently you do not want that. While the developers answered that more eyes on the street and more community investment is buildings are fixed up and added onto would help decrease crime and don't have to cause displacement. But the best answer came from Reverend Wilson Taylor who is here for Daniel Wilkins seminar fine. Or do you in the spring? Reverend Taylor said that the most important thing that we as architects and academics can do is to renew current residents belief in the value of what they already have in their community. And to help them imagine what it can be in the future. My hope with this work in this exhibition is that maybe some young residents of the area will see some of these proposals and start thinking about becoming architects or developers or planners, or in some other way, thinking about how big an act to shape the future of their built environment and how that will change history in the future. Thank you very much. If there are questions, happy to answer them. Super clear. Decimal. Or I'm certainly a lot of architects do try to do that and I think should, especially as we're studying it in school, I tried to focus on things that actually have to do with what we're putting into the built environment. Since that's the kind of bread and butter of what we're studying in design, in architecture school. But to be, being aware of and trying to be active both as just citizens and also people who have a little bit more potential kind of like ability to convince others, I think is also important. Yes. Terry, such as the body, she and church getting patients? Yes. So we had a heart I yes. We had a hard time coordinating a site visit of the church, so I wasn't actually there for that, unfortunately bow, but the students who looked at the church did go in and did take photographs. So I might be able to dig those up for you should see disasters really change. Yeah. Interestingly, the church also is no longer for sale, but I can't find evidence that it's sold. I'm not sure exactly what happened with that, but I can also try to try to get you a visit. I know everyone on Whitehall Street now, so gas-rich? Yes. Yeah. All right. So there's two things. I mean, the primary studio pedagogy. Pedagogy is still mostly typological, informal. And all of the kind of considerations of talking to the community members and thinking about programming. Those are things that I think are just our responsibility. Those are things that I want to do and every studio that I'm teaching. And they particularly come up with reuse because of the role that it has and rising property values. But I would say with all of these projects, I really encourage the students to think about them as strategies. So that's where I actually made up the terms that were used on there. But we use that they gave things a lot of different definitions throughout the term. But to think about these proposals is something that actually could be done to buildings that fit Kind of X, Y, and Z parameters. So for example, the last student projects that I showed by Tory in Berlin, I called it scar and parasite because I actually find that to be a pretty, I mean, those are a little bit more provocative terms maybe than the others. And that project I think, is a kind of commentary on the aftermath of, of a certain kind of industry. And so I think that I'm always trying to think about these things in terms of something that I can use going forward or a strategy that I might not have thought about before. Some of these are strategies that I already had. What about in conveyed to the students via the London work? And some of them are like, for example, the buyer mediated Earth. That's not something I ever thought about before because it's not something that came up in the contexts that like bomb damage. But it's a, it's a very interesting kind of provocation that could potentially be leveraged on other kind of Brownfield sites. And I'm very curious just to know if rammed earth can be made out of by our immediate and soil, right? These kinds of things, There's our material questions like that that come up. And as you know, I'm looking at things kind of on a material scale at the same time as looking at the building scale. Because I've really becoming, I've been becoming more and more convinced that they're just not separable. Yes. Stored in. So we can scroll back a whole bunch, maybe close your eyes while I flashed through all of the slides. There is a building. They're currently that is it just I had already kind of thoughts and they also agreed that it was not activating the corner. And it also you can kinda see it here. It has like a smoke shop. A wings place. There's also wings place across the street. The Shell station for That's like the one food there is. And as we just never saw a lot going on with these and they're so like pulled back from the street. I mean, one thing that I had kind of like posited to my end to the group that she was working with was that they might think about the footprint of that building is something that stays there over time. They did not go in that direction, but they also had looked at, and this is on one of those archival compilations that I showed at the beginning. They looked at some of the mom and pop shops that were originally on that corner back when it seemed a lot more vibrant. So we pull those up here. That is the big image in the middle. So those were the shops that were there previously and that was back when that was the last kind of moment that we were able to identify street activity in terms of small-scale retail and in terms of like diners. And there's another diner, they're called injuries Grill, which I haven't been able to precisely locate, but I've put approximately where where it's located. But yeah, that corner used to be a lot more going, I guess I would say. And so that's also when one of the big questions with like a new construction in the context of the studio is just like know where to start. So she looked at this, at this, and look at the scale of this which is replicated and her proposal and even these kinds of like details of different sort of like facade elements are just barely recognizable in some of the recombinations that she made on all of the different faces. And she was it was kind of a mediation between like a compromise between a corner park, which was her, I think original impulse. She's now studying landscape architecture as well as architecture and a building. So we kind of arrived at something in between so that it would be kinda controllable as in like it's not just open space that can kind of like be taken over by any one at any time. But it is throughout the day kind of accessible to everyone. Yes. One of the groups have the initial instinct to and refer to urban farm or something a lot media market. Ultimately that will actually work in the community ever lived there and there were any other discoveries along those lines. The numbers that some of our VB initial things. Mm-hm. Mm-hm. Yeah. I mean, you'll see that one of the groups, so that was the first group I talked about. The second group still went forward with the farm idea because they, you know, they really like we're committed to doing it. One of the things that came up with idea and Kyla was some at a few reviews along the way. I don't think this happened towards the end of the term, but if you a few reviews along the way there was the comment like putting a grocery store right next to housing is gentrifying. And Kyla said, and I really appreciated that she sort of stuck to her principal. She said, I've heard that before. It makes no sense to me that having food readily available to your housing is in itself gentrifying. It shouldn't be that should be something that should be accessible to everyone. So she's still going to propose it. So yeah, the farming thing was one that came up. The idea. There were two things there that both which to me she told us one was that they had tried urban farms and just, you know, nobody wants to keep them up. It's a lot of work. That kind of rings true with somebody who started gardening during the pandemic and then other things came along. And also that, you know, not everybody wants to cook their own food. And there were multiple things along those lines of kind of like casual education that needs to take place. There were a lot of suggestions for things that we might call education, but that are not in any way formal education. So people don't necessarily know how to repair their own belongings anymore, resulting in them having to continually purchase new stuff. And this is not just in mechanics. Well, I mean that yep, this was, this was kinda like general statement, but she said in particular here it is an issue because there there aren't there's not a lot of access to fresh groceries. There is actually going to be, I think a publics built near the site in 2023. But that's a little ways off. So there's still, it's like the wings places and there just isn't that much other kind of prepared foods or groceries until you get down into the the grocery store. I spoke to the owner is way down in South mechanics though, and that was another So the owner of that brought up a few things. I wouldn't say it was surprising, but it was something that I wouldn't have thought to think about before, which was that this is the woman who owns the buildings that she wants to rent out to local business owners. She was saying, when property values rows, a lot of especially older people just had no education in terms of knowing how to like, hold on to their how to how to pursue homeownership back when it would have been affordable to them. And so they never had because they just kinda assumes that rents would stay the same, but there's no stabilization, so that didn't happen. And then a lot of them ended up losing. A place of residence. And so she was proposing bat. And this is something that she's just kind of a person we call, contacted in the community, but had ideas about the community needs some kind of Education program to teach people who are currently renting, what would be involved with home owning, among other things that would help them become more financially stable over time. I don't think anyone actually ended up presumably who were all very interested in that. Nobody actually ended up pursuing that as a program. One of the hard things was trying to get the students not to have, you know, ten programs because it was like others. All of these interesting things we could do that the community needs, but we tried to pair it down. Yes. How would you phase it? I mean, that's a good question. We didn't talk a lot about phasing in 20 in 2030 is very ambitious, but I had to put a number on it. It's good to be optimistic. I mean, I think that the feeling is for a few reasons. Housing would be the first thing. One of the reasons for that is that it will. So if Ronald Battista builds his project, for example, he's a developer with a certain amount of clout. He's doing something that is extremely expensive, largely through kind of government grants to clean that Earth like he bought. I think he bought the site for $0.5 million. That's going to cause 19 million dollars to buy remediate it. So he's going to be able to get like a speed bump put in or around about. So there's around about being put in. I don't think it's been put in yet, but it's about to be put in just southwest of the site. So things like that, that will kind of like start some of the things happening that will then enable like a daycare. Like I would never put a daycare there right now because the car speed so fast and there's just will be a nightmare. But maybe once it becomes more residentially friendly, those kind of next steps can come. And I think that that's housing would be the first thing. And then when food is also like the next most imperative thing that just kept coming up. But that will be the publics. So, so to what extent do we live in a studio? Do we let ourselves live in a kind of like, well, if we find out halfway through studio that they're building a pig's, I'm not going to change the vacuum and making a grocery store. That was good news to everyone that there's a public coming in. Thank you. Yes. Yes. I'll I'll have the exact date on that soon. And I can answer you guys questions after because I don't want to keep everybody. So. Thank you.