GRAPPLING: Reschooling the town of Greenville

It's rather late getting here, but I'm finally putting my finished thesis up on the blog.  Get in touch if you have any questions or want to learn more about this massive, year long undertaking of a project.  To see a video of me presenting this project, please follow this link,

INTRODUCTION
Michel Foucault, in his 1975 book Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, taught us that institutions derive their power through tools of enclosure, partitioning and control. 

The reasons architects love him is that he was able to make the link between architecture and the ways that institutions derive their power.  He was able to spatialise control.  Show that architecture is the thing that bolsters the strength of an institution. 

But his research deals mostly with institutions that already have great amounts of power.  Rome, the milstary, the monasteries etc.  But what about institutions that don’t have a lot of power.  Insitutions in crisis.  What can Foucault teach us about them?

My thesis is that unlike Foucault who wrote that institutions consolidate their power through strategies of isolation and uniqueness, I hypothesise that in moments of crisis there are a set of tools that can solidify power by creating dependencies between institutions. That one institution bolsters another one rather than that institution rallying around itself – creating what Foucault would call a “protected space of enclosure”.  My supposition is that architecture can be an essential tool create that strengthening institutional bond.

THE SITE

Greenville, in the High Sierras of Northern California, is a small logging town in a picturesque mountain setting.  Their main economy is, and has been for several generations, logging and forestry services, but a look at the harvest yield in California over the last several decades sees a year on year decline.  That kind of pattern, for a small town like this, is potentially crippling.  Indeed the population has also declined year on year, reducing the town by half over the last decade.

As if to add the the drama, the only public high school in the town is under negotiations to be closed permanently resulting in every Greenville student being bused on a four hour round trip to the next nearest school.

So we have a town in crisis, more specifically a school in crisis – and it’s this school that I’ll be working with.  Now Foucault would probably say that strategies of enclosure, or partitioning or creating functional sites would be the way to rally this institution.  I, however, have other ideas.

RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

Federal learning outcomes called ‘The Common Core’ outline educational priorities for the nation.  Deliberately vague, these standards include things like the ability to apply mathematical thinking to real world scenarios, conducting research and composing a logical argument.  

A three-day design workshop was undertaken with kids and adults from Greenville, the results of which revealed overlaps between many existing institutions in the town and ‘The Common Core’ learning objectives.  Two sites that continually recurred were the Mohawk Trading Company (The Mechanic) and Hunter Ace (The Hardware Store).  Having identified these institutions as potential sites of learning, they were then infiltrated and adjusted by various scholastic programmes to form scenarios beneficial to both the school and the original institution.   The focus of these scenarios is to benefit both institutions, but ultimately strengthen the town as a whole.

Mohawk is the main mechanic in town.  And for a hard living, blue collar, agrarian town such as this, this institution becomes a key industry facilitator. 

And the hardware store is so much more than simply a place that sells tools and gardening supplies.  John Hunter, keeps this repository of contemporary and historical town memorabilia.  And so becomes a cultural institution of the town.

JUST TO SUMMARISE SO FAR…

We have a programme that gets distributed throughout the town.  We have sites that have been identified by the kids in the town.  And we have a project that tests this thesis.

But how do we get to the architecture?

We do this in the same way that we found the sites – by looking at the existing assets of the town.  This strategy uses the existing generations of knowledge of working with lumber and combines it with the heavy machinery associated with the logging industry.

The dominant institution is the logging industry and so it follows that a rich history of forestry and knowledge of lumber exists in the community.  As large-scale logging becomes less viable the high-torque heavy machinery required for this profession is no longer necessary.  Each machine comes equipped with a high spec and powerful five-axis grapple, which, in this proposal, gets repurposed as a form-making manipulator on steamed and glu-lammed wood. Strategic retrofit interventions align the new material properties of the wood with architectural operations (such as long-span members, apertures, enclosure, spatial separation, controlling views and furniture).

So the proposal takes the movement of wood and translates it into large scale steam bent form.

Certain things govern this form generation.  At the logging scale, we have the range of motion of the grappler.

Then at the tectonic scale we have the actual limitations of the wood.  At the fibrous level, how far would it go before it fails.  And there are, of course, infinite possibilities of forms that can be generated with steam bent wood, so reign it in a bit, I created a taxonomy of forms based on a cut and then a bend.

And then at the architectural scale, we have the aggregation and combination of these forms.

DESIGN - HUNTER ACE HARDWARE

So in the first instance, the hardware store, we added pretty standard scholastic programme that respond to the existing traits of the store.  i.e. art dept and raised beds.  Then in response to the Common Core traits as idenfied by the workshop, we re-appropriated the upstairs storage space into science laboratories.

But it’s the building parti, here, that blends the two institutions together in a way that is sympathetic to it being a kind of cultural hub.  The two institutions push into each other to create a soft boundary condition and in that thickened space, create a third, hybrid insitituion that complements and benefits the two programmes.

You see here, we’ve used the Omega piece to create a soft boundary that is offset to create visual porosity from one side to another.  Additionally, in the volume created by this omega piece, we have interlocking fingers that become small gallery spaces for John Hunter to curate his repository of contemporary artifacts and memorabilia.

Additionally we also strategically direct all circulation through the hardware store doors, blending the programmes and creating connections on a social, cultural level.

The benefits for the kids is that it involves them in the contemporary dialogue of the town.  And the benefit for the town is that it actively involves them in the education of its kids.

DESIGN - MOHAWK TRADING COMPANY

In contrast, Mohawk, acting as the institutional hub of industry, we employ a parti where the annexation is more about adjacency.

The scholastic programme that we’ve added directly responds to the common core criteria but embraces the potential for Mohawk to generate a new type of future for the town.  As the hub for industry, we can place this at the center of the town revival.  So we introduce a design/engineering department to the site.  Generating new scholastic programme for the town. 

We have a shop added to the back here, where they learn more practical skills.  Then upstais on the other side, we reappropriate this space as classrooms where they learn more theoretical content.  Then we link these with an elevated walkway/gallery here that mediates views into the mechanics shop using this wishbone tectonic.  It gives you a nice sectional moment as your brought to eye level with the vehicles that are on the hoists inside the mechanic.  So you have theory and practice straddling the place were the application of those skills is carried out. 

Circulation is then also separated.

I’ve assessed that unlike in the cultural scenario of the hardware store, where user intermingling strengthens the annexed institution, the physical separation and controlled exposure of one institution to another that acts as the strengthening agent from this more professional insitution for the town.

IN CONCLUSION 

Foucault’s thoughts on institutions, despite their relevance and application to the architectural canon are of little worth when it comes to an institution in real crisis.  Indeed strategies on conjoining and annexation generate potentials for hybrid institutions.  But also we can create strength through adjacencies and strategic exposure.  The architecture of the annex provides a distributed system to strengthen the core institutions and ultimately the broader community as a whole.  This kind of architecture would have a benefit in this kind of scenario of crisis because it capitalises on the existing assets of the town. 

I.e. knowledge of lumber

Infrastructural machinery

Local resources

Existing institutional strengths.