This is our third and final design project of the semester in this class. We were tasked by our teacher to create a technical school in San Francisco, California. We weren't given any passive goals with this project but I chose to remodel an existing building on-site and by doing so I used sustainable ideals. We were told to provide a site plan, floor plans, elevations, a detailed building section, a detailed wall section, a booklet of the project from the beginning to the end, and a series of renderings.

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I started on the project by picking a site, we were given six options to choose from. The site I chose is located near Moscone Softball Fields and it currently shares its site with the Heritage on the Marina nursing home. With some urging from one of my teachers I decided on doing a retrofit and modification of the Heritage on the Marina nursing home as a way of integrating the existing building into my new building. After deciding on the site I did research on the building's typology around the world and building typology around the city, around that time I got the concept of creating a second structure to house the main classrooms and to repurpose the existing building into the new entrance and work spaces for the school. While doing research I started reading about James Wines and the work of SITE, Wines' firm and I also did research into the major earthquakes that hit San Francisco in 1906. Using this information I came up with a concept of intentionally giving the existing brick building a damaged appearance as a way of representing these events, the two structures would be joined together by a glass-covered courtyard that would feature a design resembling fire as a way of representing the resulting firestorm after the 1906 earthquake I was eventually led away from this design by one of my teachers pointing out I should use the existing building as an integral piece of the new school and my other teacher pointed out that stylizing a school with a fire motif isn't the best idea. I was eventually given an idea by one of my professors as I was struggling with a form, he suggested taking the basic "U" shape of the existing building and mirroring it to the east, so the new part of the building would resemble a backwards version of the existing building. With this idea in mind I decided to completely remove the fire motif and to focus instead on the idea of an earthquake. I did more research and I came across information on the Vaillancourt Fountain and the construction and later demolition of the Embarcadero Freeway. With these ideas in mind, I stylized the interior courtyard after a buckled road surface and the courtyard roof columns after collapsing columns. I also removed the interior of the existing building's roof and I embedded the courtyard roof into the resulting space, so from the exterior the existing building looks fine but on the interior the new design becomes apparent.

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In terms of sustainable features, the major feature was the reuse of an existing building.