Jennifer Ortiz - Senior Project

LAST

I am done almost with my drawing.  Finally! Over break I plan to finish my paper.  I didnt think it was going to be so long, but once I started doing it I realized that there was so much to talk about.  I realized that when someone looks at my drawing they are not going to understand what it was representing.  My paper includes the development and downfall of suburbia, the principles of new urbanism, new technologies for building green homes and the impact of farming on a community. 

I am really glad I chose this project because everything I was interested in came together.  I enjoyed researching all of these new ideas and technologies. 

Eleven

I spent this week drawing my final drawing and laying out all the details.  It is very tedious to draw in all the trees and walkways throughout the area. It was challenging to decide what to put on the drawing and what to leave out because the drawing was becoming too busy.  I decided to not draw in the sidewalks, and to only show the lots of the houses instead of the actual house. 

This week I also started writing my paper.  It is going to include what my intentions were in relation to the principles of New Urbanism.

I have also been working on my process folio and gathering all the work I have done and pasting it in the book. 

Eleven

I spent this week drawing my final drawing and laying out all the details.  It is very tedious to draw in all the trees and walkways throughout the area. It was challenging to decide what to put on the drawing and what to leave out because the drawing was becoming too busy.  I decided to not draw in the sidewalks, and to only show the lots of the houses instead of the actual house. 

This week I also started writing my paper.  It is going to include what my intentions were in relation to the principles of New Urbanism.

I have also been working on my process folio and gathering all the work I have done and pasting it in the book. 

Ten

This week I made a lot of changes to my drawing.  I moved the two town centers closer together, came up with a layout for the train station and decided to show the lots of houses instead of the house itself.  I have also been thinking about how im going to exhibit my work.  I know im going to be showing a short video and need a place where my 3-D model can sit. 

These are the new drawings from this week:

 
Next week I will start to my final drawing .

nine

This week I finished a rough draft of my drawing. 

I also spoke to my outside consultant and he told me to make some changes.  He told me to take away the parking places right on 27 because that did not look good.  He also told me to make one main road that ran North- South instead of having four.  A final suggestion he was was merge the two town centers together because they were too far apart or bring them closer together. 

I have a lot to do over break!

Eight

This week I continued to work on my rough sketch of the town.  I've spent a lot of time on this part of my project because we find things to change constantly.  This week we realized that the town as a whole look too much like a grid and too formal.  So we decided to change it a little bit and make the roads flow more and for the grid to not have so many straight edges.  We also realized that the town did not have enough green spaces, so we decided to designate some of the blocks to be green areas where people can go and just hang out.  We also realized that even though people aren't going to be using cars to get around in the town, the majority is still going to own at least one car for when they need to travel farther away for work or something, so we needed to figure out how to add additional parking spaces for the homes and the plazas while still keeping a green scenery through out. 

One of the challenging parts this week was trying to decided whether to have the farmland be proportional in area to the developed land.  We ended up deciding to split it in half more or less because we need a lot of land to grow food. 

Seven

During these past few weeks I've been starting to layout my community.  During this process a lot of questions came up that i haven't thought about before.  For example, how big is a city block?  What ratio should be good between residential land and land that will be used for agriculture and recreation in this site?  How big are the lots for townhouses, single family homes and apartment building?  The width of roads and sidewalks? etc. 

I did a lot of research and finally have an idea of what it is going to look like.  

I am hoping to finish the rough draft by today and start the final drawing by the beginning of next week. 

Six

This week was very stressful.  I had a lot of trouble getting the map to be a good enough resolution to have it be printed out in 40x30 in. paper.  So i decided to project the image instead and trace it.  After I was done tracing it I realized that the scale was off.  So I had to do it over again. 

This week I am going to use tracing paper to set up some ideas on how im going to space my community and how i am going to divide the space between buildings and farmland. 

Five

This week I've been doing some sketches to plan out the layout of the town.  I started by taking my outside consultant's advice and using Montauk Hwy.  and the LIRR as the main areas where the public squares and the most dense living areas are going to be.  He also suggested that I add another main road running N-S down the middle of the area.  Many questions arouse while doing these sketches like how much commerce can survive in a town this size?  This would affect the way the main town squares are going to look like and how they are going to function.  Another question is how much farmland is necessary in order to maintain the population living in this area.  This would affect the way the housing is going to be spread out.

Next week I plan to start doing the 2-D drawing on the big site map. 

Four

This week I wrote my rubric and during this process my mentor and I realized that a virtual model of the town was not a good idea.  I really wanted to made a 3-D model and my mentor thought that having a virtual model and a 3-D model would be hard for me to accomplish in the remaining time.  So we decided to make a 2-D color rendering of the community.  This is going to be a hand drawn map that will show the density of the community in different areas and show the layout of the town more clearly.  This is easier than making a virtual model, therefore giving me more time to complete a 3-D model of the whole town.

This was a very important decision because I really don't like using computers and this gives me the opportunity to work with my hands more.