[RE]calcification | darrdesign

Location: Rainier Beach, WA

Year: Thesis -- 2015

[Re]calcification inserts a unique opportunity into the post-industrialized south Rainier neighborhood. It offers a brevy of educational services, directed towards teenagers and adults alike. Recreation class are interwoven into local-artist crafted spaces, which sit adjacent to study spaces and work areas. Four large atria grasp the site and provide vestibules for users to ascend into the safe and lively atmosphere. The complex also offers a series of live-work units, where small business owners can live just floors above the indoor retail or covered market stalls.

[RE]calcification

interweave sensory experience // fortify diverse integration

Architecture is drifting towards a separation that is removing its users attachment to the spaces in which they live. Connection is being cast aside for purity, and personal identity for sterilization. If designers continue down the path of involuntary schism activity, architecture becomes meaningless. By addressing social, ethnic, religious, and gender diversity not as boundaries, but as defining synthesizing characteristics, design can exude a successful aesthetic while establishing and promoting a multi-level social connectivity.