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.
While we haven't posted anything in a while that doesn't mean we haven't been busy...... so here is a quick rundown of the fun stuff we have been up to in the last couple of months.
We are starting on the next chapter of our work with Agros International. For a while we have been talking about making a best practice manual tailored to Agros’s development model. We are happy to announce that we have just started that work with the first chapter of that manual. We are beginning with the chapter focused on site selection as it is naturally the first step in developing a new village.
The last time we talked about Tierra Nueva (TN) it was a bit messy. The water situation was not looking good, and we were scrambling to figure out a new solution. Well, the good new is that TN now has a plentiful supply of clean water!
After I graduated from undergrad at the University of Virginia, I decided that I really needed to learn how to build buildings- physically- not just theoretically. I took a job at Big Timberworks in Gallatin Gateway Montana as an intern architect and sometimes builder.
The myth of the architect as the lone creator is a pervasive one. Whether it is the fictionalized architect of novels, toiling away in his office or the starchitect being lauded for the work of a five hundred person firm, our culture seems determined to avoid thinking of creation as an act of collaboration. We recently had the pleasure of working on a project that is great example of how even a small project requires a great amount of collaboration.
It’s an unfortunate reality that many of the homes we live in are not very energy efficient. In Seattle, much of the older single family housing stock was built in a time when energy was of no concern at all. There was abundant fuel right outside your door for the taking. As a result, these older homes were built with little to no insulation and their exterior envelopes are extremely leaky (energy wise).
This is one of the topics that pops up fairly frequently with clients during design discussions and we thought that we would share some of our thoughts. With the right material choice and the right finish, plywood as a flooring material has a modern feel but still carries the warmth of wood and is usually significantly cheaper than hardwood. We have used plywood as flooring in two of our own projects and recently we have been talking with other practitioners who have used it in order to decide if we wnated to use it again. After careful consideration our final verdict is.... maybe.
This is one of those posts that has been sitting in the edit bin for a while. Not because we didn't want to get it out there but because.... Well, everything kept changing. And it still is. Changing that is. But after a while we thought we would just throw it out there as it might be instructive to show how uncertain things can be in the global development world.
In early 2011 we returned from the Matagalpa region of Nicaragua where we had been working on a master plan for another new Agros village. The only catch was that instead of a new 30 household village, which is what we had done for the last three, we were working on a new 150 household village. Needless to say we encountered some scale issues.