Design and build 2013

Design + build:

Greening a school campus

I’m working on a design + build project in brooklyn.

We’re greening a school campus. Now it’s mostly dried out bare dirt and asphalt.

we want art and plants everywhere. We drew Garden and mural ideas on the schoolyard with chalk. Meanwhile, we looked at the cracks and dips and holes.

We walked around and explored the whole campus Outdoors‌

‌and indoors.

There’s a greenhouse that was built in the school in 1950!

The whole campus was green when they built it in 1950!

Outdoor classrooms!

School gardens, compost pits, and cold frames!

We made giant maps of the school, the yard, and the streets around. We mapped what we already knew about the place, and questions.

Why is this area with dirt so dry and dusty?

these trees look dead Over here

How come on the 1950 map there are gardens here and now it’s just dirt?

Why are there only a little bit of swings in only one side of the park when mostly all the swings are always full of kids? the playground is cracked here. There are holes

there are no flowers and no grass in these dirt areas.

we put on the map the good things about the campus…

Kids skate here

Play!

Food grows here!

Cars are too fast here …And the bad.

Kids aren’t allowed on the school roof

We wrote surveys and gave them to everyone. We organized the results.

We made moveable pieces of all the ideas

and we moved them on the maps in many different ways.

We showed our ideas to the principal and the teachers. They gave us permission to build gardens and paint the old schoolyard.

For our roof ideas, they said we need an architect

We showed our roof ideas to an architect. she worked with us to turn them into designs.

We took these designs to the borough president and we got funding to start planning the roof.

Meanwhile we got to work on the things we could do ourselves‌

We visited gardens near our school campus to get design ideas. We met with gardeners and interviewed them. We learned about permaculture, biodynamics, and sustainable design.

A rainwater harvest tank!

The slope on the left rolls rain to the garden on the right

Raised beds filled with compost !

We made lists of Design Principles.

Some Permaculture principles, adapted from bill mollison The role of a successful design is to create a self managed system 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

Work with nature The problem is the solution Make the least change for the greatest possible effect The only limit on the use of a resource is the imagination of the designer Everything gardens, or has an effect on its environment

Some biodynamic principles, adapted from rudolf steiner An ideal farm is self contained. It produces everything it needs.

1. Understand human and plant nutrition 2. Recognize subtle interactions in nature 3. Replenish the soil Some youth participatory design principles Put organizing and fact finding first, before coming up with design ideas 1.

Organizing 2. Fact finding 3. Generating ideas 4. Creating designs 5. Building the place and maintaining it some sustainable design principles 1. Maintenance first 2. Use what you already have 3. Meet the needs of your place and people 4. Turn waste into value 5. fair trade and labor

we added new ideas to our maps, using good design principles.

We put our designs on the computer

We made changes to designs based on people’s feedback and new information

We made posters of our designs and got more feedback from people.

We began to build our designs. We planted gardens where there was already soil.

We put a track and field where there was already a hard surface.

We made stencils of baseball bases and spray painted them around the track.

We sealed and waterproofed the cracks and added murals and a track in We harvested fromalready our gardens the areas food that were hard surface.

The school chef collected the food from us

We made stencils of baseball bases and spraypainted them on the fresh painted ground

We served the food from the gardens in the school cafeteria.

We put in a new salad bar to serve all the food from the gardens

Meanwhile, our planning for the roof was going great.

We learned our building could support a green roof. We visited green roofs all over the city.

Using our design principles and all the information we collected, we worked on designs for the whole campus, including the roof.

We drew on the computer‌.

..and we drew by hand.

We designed a maintenance plan for our green campus.

We don’t want our work to disappear like the 1950 gardens did.

Green roof

Food gardens

playgrounds

Grassy play area

Today we went up on the roof to check on the progress.

It looks great!

stone caps on the brick so we can drill in poles to build living walls!

green roof tiles so we can farm and build play areas and kids can be up here!

The end