first semester summary

RE-INFRASTRUCTURING/RE-SIGNIFYING OBSERVATORY HILL

This semester I focused on the ground of O-Hill, reading the evolution of the site’s meaning through its past and present roads.

I read the topography at two scales:

19th-century carriage road trace

I looked at the ground itself, reading it as a palimpsest of 19^th-century carriage road traces, while also thinking about the effects of its current roads.

1937 aerial photograph of uva and charlottesville

And at a more zoomed out scale, I overlaid historic maps and aerial photos with GIS information, looking at the flows and connections that have historically structured the relationship between UVa and the site.

model of hydrology and road networks, past and present (paper, wire, copper plate, vellum)

These explorations revealed that the site had lost several of its former meanings over time—its significance as a threshold (to the landscape to the west, the Blue Ridge), a source (the Observatory Hill Valley is the source of Meadow Creek, which historically supplied the university with water and also tied it, along that watershed thread, to Charlottesville), and a wilderness foil (to the hyper-architectural experience of Grounds).

My goal was to restore these former meanings with design.

Specifically, I wanted to craft a tension between past and present infrastructures and make the site’s past legible through the use (or reuse) of both road form and material. I did this with two moves:

-- Weaving a set of paths through the network of old road traces on the north-facing slope of the valley, to choreograph encounters between past and present.

-- Removing a portion of the road at the top of the hill, which would restore the connections and meanings the hill has lost. I would be siting the two programs (academic retreat and ash garden cemetery) at the site of this removal.

THE INTERWOVEN PATHS

layered plan drawings of light, canopy texture, former and current roads, and topography-- vellum, charcoal, pencil

The approach to the head of the valley/top of Observatory Hill would involve a journey through changing qualities of light and dark and changing experiences of scale.

I noticed in my initial site visits that there was a coincidence of road disturbance and light.

inverse section drawings of topography and light

In other words, an impact to the ground (compaction, change in grade) resulted in an atmospheric change; light was carved into the landscape as traffic carved the ground. The experience of scale also changed at these places—the north-facing slope of the valley is covered with a dense thicket of mountain laurel, which is body-height, but in the old road beds the laurel disappears and there moments with a cathedral-like atmosphere, with light concentrated in the soaring canopy of columnar chestnut oaks.

diagram of forest

These encounters with the old road traces would be moments of pause, “gardens of light” functioning as thresholds between two phenomenological conditions of carved ground and sky. They would also be moments of tension between past and present, thresholds between the history indexed into the ground and the indexing of current movement across the site.

Additionally, by following this old network, the structure of the proposed paths would restore the logic and ecological sensitivity historically involved in the approach to the site—They would run along the stream corridor and provide visual access to the springs.

ROAD REMOVAL

The most explicit change between past and present visible in comparisons of the maps and photos is the creation of a loop road, along the top of the ridge of the valley, which so explicitly cut a series of connections and reduced the most spectacular part of site (top of hill, head of valley) to a 20mph experience.

By removing the road, the cut would be transformed into a seam that balances these former relationships between Hill/Grounds/Blue Ridge/Meadow Creek, restoring, as well, the site’s status as a destination, a wilderness foil to Grounds.

In removing the road, I would leave the roadbed visible as a trace and recycle the asphalt. Connections between east and west would be restored through cutting and piling asphalt, shaping ground, directing water, and planting. The ASH GARDEN would be sited along this removed road, over-looking head of valley. I thought of the addition of ash to the ground as the inverse wearing it away through traffic. The burial process would rearticulate a connection to grounds through this reused material, cast in various patterns to express a restored directionality.

clay study model of proposed road removal

ACADEMIC RETREAT

section model of academic retreat

The academic retreat is sited at a fork in the road, between the removed road that had formed part of the loop and the trace of a road that had continued west.

This tension between past and present infrastructures would be expressed in both design and construction.

The structure is almost entirely shaped ground. I imagined an extreme wearing down of ground, how traffic and erosion over time could ultimately become a form of “construction.”

clay study model of academic retreat

The road form ingrained in the structure’s form would, additionally, provoke east-west movement along the building.

cardboard study model of academic retreat

The architectural component of the structure is a single, continuous folding plane (its form recalls my site installation) that appears to be either shaped by that ground or suspending the ground in that form.

site installation

I expressed a shift in materials through a geometric gradient generated in Grasshopper.

folded/laser-cut paper model

The retreat structure overlooks the valley, forming the tie back to the University, but also affords views of larger geological/topographical context to the west, creating a visual tie to the landscape that cannot be physically restored (a highway now bounds the western edge of the hill).