Introduction

The Stewardship Project

Faculty Member: Jori Erdman, Associate Professor and Director of The Center for Community Growth and Change

Community Partners: City of Clemson, Chip Boyles, Assistant City Administrator
Pendleton Foundation for Black History and Culture

Abstract

The Stewardship Project will engage a mixed undergraduate and graduate Architecture student team in the study of sustainable materials and community engagement through the design and construction of a demonstration pavilion and maintenance to a cultural site, both with integrated educational signage. Sites include Jaycee Park on College Avenue and the Hundreds site in Pendleton, SC. Students will study the meaning of sustainability, both in the physical implementation of a structure and in the long term impact of construction in the social and cultural life of a community. The architecture studio will be used as a laboratory in which students bring resources and ideas for experimentation. By executing real projects the students will also need to work with community members, material suppliers and other related disciplines in order to have a successful experience.


Clemson Site Pendleton Site

Statement of Community Need

The City of Clemson has a developing interest in sustainability but it is not at the level of adopting wholesale change to any building practices or building standards. It is hope that the construction of a demonstration pavilion will educate the community about the potential within sustainable practices to create interesting architectural projects.

The Town of Pendleton, particularly the community around the Hundreds site, does not have the means to maintain and add to the public space that has been created by previous Clemson interventions. The site continues to be a site of significant memories for the community but lacks proper signage to recognize the importance of the place.

Both communities can be better informed about the impact of constructed space and materials through the implementation of an on-site targeted educational program of signage. The design of the signage will necessitate student – community communication and collaboration.

Goals and Objectives

It is the intent of this project that students achieve the following learning outcomes:
s Research skills in the area of building materials
s Critical insight in the application of certain materials in atypical ways
s Sustainable building practices
s Community engagement through design
s Collaborative design practices
s Knowledge of construction and the potential for hands-on design decision making

Implementing design-build projects into the curriculum is part of the larger strategic plan within our department and thus has the support of our chair. The added value of this project will be the research and inquiry component that allows students to actively participate in a study of sustainable and community based practices.

These two projects serve as ideal models for ideas about sustainability. The Clemson project will be more focused on environmental issues and the Pendleton project will be more focused on cultural issues but the two projects will intertwine and inform each other as they progress in parallel throughout the semester.

Methodology and Timeline

This studio course will be a vertical integration of graduate and undergraduate students. The undergraduates will be upper level (graduating fourth year students) and the work builds on previous semesters in which they have developed the skills, attitudes and aptitudes needed to take on this type of investigation. In previous semesters at Clemson these students have been introduced to the basic concepts of materials, community activism and sustainability…both cultural and environmental. They also have highly developed technical skills and the ability to handle increasingly complex projects.

The Stewardship Project will take place in the curriculum as a 6 credit studio course. Students will elect my studio as one of 4 optional studios. Graduate students will facilitate the learning and research experience for the undergraduates. At this point there are fourteen students enrolled in the two courses combined.

The primary activities will be designing and building the projects throughout the semester. Funding will also allow us to take a field trip to study one of the most successful design-build initiatives in the country, the Rural Studio in Alabama.

The Demonstration Pavilion in downtown Clemson has a strict timeline and must be completed by April 2008. In January the students will immediately begin design work and construction will quickly follow. Engineering professors have expressed interest in this project as place that they can apply some experimentation that has been going on with recycled materials. We intend to integrate these into the project and use them as part of the educational programming. In addition to working with Engineering, we will be working with the South Carolina chapter of the US Green Building Council and other community partners such as Duke Energy.

For the site in Pendleton, we will be revisiting a site that was worked on 4 years ago by Clemson architecture students. We will be conducting some needed maintenance to the previous interventions as well as constructing a new component. This will require that the students continue the cultural research done years ago and build on the latent community knowledge of events to design and construct the new interventions.


Evaluation plan

The success of the projects in the communities will be difficult to measure in the short-term but we hope to develop measures as part of the educational programming.

Student engagement will be measured by narrative accounts written in a journal throughout the semester. Students will follow guidelines and be evaluated during the course of the semester on their level of engagement and understanding of course content, both technical and cultural.