Assignment 02: rising action

team members: evan jape, winslet dsouza, cayley chan

Micro-COMM encompasses the creation of micro-communities within the development as a way of creating meaningful connections and forming a safe close-knit dynamic. Safety, privacy, and facilitation of internal community socialization are key concerns within our design exploration. We began by creating a series of individual iterations that tackled spatial adaptability, circulation, and barricading visually and auditorily from the highway.  The sloping of forms takes advantage of the reserve view through terracing while reinforcing a separation between the highway and the residential components of the site. Our final iteration, consisting of a kit of parts, centralizes around the inversion of the courtyard typology originally envisioned, creating a division of core residential blocks with greenspaces on each level. Other focuses of our design include the use of external circulation through the edge placement of our ramp cores and the division between communal spaces and private residences through prescribed primary, secondary and experiential circulation routes.

There are a variety of residential typologies across each of the cores, to facilitate the young demographic of our YIRP community.  The site is divided across 6 sections to cater to an intimate micro-community in each. The west of site features a 6-story apartment typology with retail outlets along the base of its facade, that mirror the heights along Albion Street.  The forms are guided by a progressive decline in height to integrate back to the single-story dwellings found along Peacock Street.  The positioning of the cores is designed to maximize exposure to the reserve, creating a visual relationship with communal greenspace and exploiting passive solar principles through the predominant creation of north-facing dwellings.