Your home is the most important building in your life. It is your refuge from the world. The place where you spend the majority of your time and one of the few places where you have full control over your environment. Shaping your home is major undertaking and we approach it with respect, eagerness and joy.

After the phased development thinking, we believed it would be interesting to speculate on how the village might grow. With the Agros land development model, land is purchased and living space is set aside with the assumption that everyone in the village will be farming. At some point further into the future, there will be enough density and chance happenings to combine together for other occupations to develop. How might that growth look? What direction might the community decide is best for their long term development? And more importantly, is there anything that we should think abou

From Option A, we continued to develop and refine the design using more precise dimensioning and site data.  The village is split into two areas because the community preferred to have larger lots per house (Option A) instead of keeping all the lots clustered into one area (Option B).  In the site analysis, we saw that the steep slopes and agriculture infrastructure restricted the layout growth in Area A.  In response we placed the additional lots along the existing road to the west, creating Area B.   Don’t worry though—it’s only a five minute walk between the two areas.

For the village layout of this project, we pulled strongly from the exercises and input we received on site in El Ojoche (now named La Benedicion.) As we’re sure you read in the previous post the community had differing opinions on the relationship between civic buildings and their placement in the village layout. There were also differences between the men and women in the proportion of the lot sizes.

While our plans and the rendering below show the full development of La Benedicion, there are many steps between then and now.  To help visualize the process of growth, we created a three phased development plan that starts with lot division, basic health block construction and play fields.  The play field location plants a seed in the collective memory of the village, connecting the space to a feeling of gathering and communion. 

After we completed our series of games and exercised with the community we were faced with a wonderful problem... we have a lot of information to dig through. We had SD cards full of pictures of lot diagrams. We had pages of notes and gigs of movies. Thankfully, we also had Chris.

Site analysis allows the architect to look for design opportunities and understand what concerns to address when developing a project.

Christopher Perrodin is the latest addition to The Global Studio roster. Over the next couple of months, Chris is going to be helping us out on the new Agros village master plans and also driving the blog for a while. Here he is introducing us to the project....

Having a site selection process is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it prevents you from buying an unsuitable site for your work and a curse because it prevents you from buying a site quickly. Actually, that is also a blessing in the long run. After vetting countless pieces of property and moving from one country to another, Agros has selected two pieces of property to begin thier next projects with.