Student Proposals--The Presentations: 17

I’m sorry for the delay in posting this. Sometimes, life gets away from me. Not only have we been overwhelmed here with an extra-large serving of regular life, but our daughter has been getting back her college decisions, and that's taken up a lot of time, too!

On March 28, John was in North Carolina—at NC State—to hear the students in the Landscape Architecture class present their proposals for use of the land. In case any of you students are reading this, please feel free to supply any corrections or additions you’d like. After all, this is my rendition of what John told me. And not only was he in and out of the room for various reasons, but his notes weren’t the best. Even he had trouble deciphering them. We’re looking forward to receiving copies of all the written proposals at the end of the course, so we’ll have to rely less on memory!

Almost all the students proposed some form of cluster housing, except for one. That’s probably to keep the amount of paving down, since driveways and roads can be shorter with cluster-site housing. The one proposal that didn’t include any houses proposed converting the entire property into a horse farm for use by NC State’s Veterinary School. She proposed housing for undergraduate and graduate students, and plenty of “housing” for horses, too, along with horse trails.

There was a proposal for a winery on the farm, with most of the farm given over to growing grapes. The development portion of the land was taken up with about 40 cluster-site houses, each on about 1/3 of an acre. Someone else proposed that the farm become a micro-brewery for beer and that water collection be done from the roofs of the houses in the development.

Another proposal was to convert the farm to a pecan farm. The farmhouse would become a restaurant that specialized in pecan-themed cuisine. The clustered houses in this proposal was grouped into small “villages.” Another proposal used five acres of the farm for solar collectors, so that the developed housing would not only be off-grid, but would be a net-energy supplier.

One student envisioned all the houses in the developed area grouped and facing one another in small groups or rings. Not concentric rings--just a series of rings. The driveways would come into the backs of the houses and all the house fronts would be facing into communal property in the center of the circle. Another proposal was based on a kind of traditional urban Chinese architecture called Siheyuan. Four houses face one another on the perimeter of a rectangle with a wall filling in the spaces between houses to complete the rectangle. This forms an interior courtyard for privacy and serenity. The woman who made this proposal also envisioned adding several small lakes to the property.

And one other plan called for 50 houses ranging from 1600 to 2400 square feet. The farm would become a site for community supported agriculture with crops grown for the development and the greater community. The horse coop would remain and there would be an ecocamp with both after-school and summer programs that would be run out of the farmhouse.

Most of the students incorporated passive solar and other standard green-housing features into the proposed homes. One even envisioned cycling homes, in which members of the development community would be able to live in different sized homes in the community as their needs changed.

I was sorry that I had to miss it. John really enjoyed the whole experience and was quite impressed with the variety of ideas and ways people viewed the farm and the property. I hope to have more details here after we receive the plans at the end of the course.