Costa Rica

Just got back from Costa Rica. Going from +30 degrees celsius to minus who knows what in Toronto makes the world suddenly feel very big again. Anyway, it was a very successful trip. We learnt a lot about the community we are studying and formed close personal ties with folks there. The project seems much more real now.

We'll be posting more pictures soon.

Getting ready for Costa Rica

We've been split into teams dealing with one of the following: Matapalo town masterplan; Matapalo town square; housing unit. We're very much about threes at the IWB because each group had to present three variants for each today. It went pretty well but there's more work to do. Everyone is now very focused on the forthcoming presentations in Costa Rica. We're presenting to both the Veritas architecture school in San Jose and to the community in Matapalo. And its coming up fast...

After the fun

The fundraiser was a great success. Our distinguished guests particularly enjoyed the cardboard studio transformation into a Costa Rican village. The mojitos went down well too.




You can see more pictures here: http://uoguelph.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2169530&id=120805034

Laneway houses

In addition to working on sustainable housing in Costa Rica, the IwB students were asked to develop concepts for a laneway house in Toronto. Laneways - narrow lanes around 9ft wide - sit behind many of the streets in Toronto. The idea is that there's enough space for a small housing unit to fit in there and thereby increase the urban density and combat sprawl. We were asked to design a unit just 400 sq ft. One example is shown here.

Fundraiser preps

We're all working hard on the fundraiser at the moment. Two of the students have created a rain forest from yoga mats. Another is building a beach. Yet another team are building houses out of cardboard. Everyone is certainly putting the work in and looking forward to a great night of fun and fundraising.

You're invited

In the spirit of catching up, we should tell you that we held a launch party a few weeks ago. It included a presentation on the Costa Rica Project from Luigi Ferrera and a general discussion afterwards.

Silence

It's been VERY busy the last month or so, which partly explains why there's been nothing happening on the blog. So what have we been doing? Well, we spent the first month doing a research report into Costa Rica. This looks at cultural, environmental and architectural issues. Since then, we've developed an intial design brief for the project. Details about the project will follow.

First week or so

We're two weeks in and it's seems to be coming together. It's a mix bag of people, with an architect, computer scientist, interior designer, product designer, public health expert, biologist etc. After a week of getting to know one another, we've now dived into the project researching Costa Rica. There are three teams each looking at a different area: cultural dynamics, construction design and sustainability. On Monday, we'll report back and see how to take the research further. We have just three weeks for this already people are talking confidently about Costa Rican politics.

We're told that IWB can get pretty intense and there already signs of this as even today, a Saturday, lots of people are installed in front of computers doing research for Monday. But as IWB has such a nice space, a kind of underground designer bunker in industrial minimalist style, it's a pretty nice place to be. But the chairs are horrible. It's like sitting in a plastic bucket all day.