It's A Wrap!

Today we submit our final project boards to NPS and the Van Alen, marking the end of our studio process. But the conversation has just started and you can join it now by visiting our website and providing feedback on our work.

Review selections from our research, our final boards, and a summary of our approach to planning and design in the national parks.

Thank you to all who have helped along the way!

WEEK 19-21: BOARDS BOARDS BOARDS

WEEK 18: PLACE-STORIES

In his much-lauded history, Native Seattle, Coll Thrush explores the concept of “place-stories,” describing how our understanding of a place is inextricably linked to the stories we hold in our imagination (4). In the case of Seattle, Thrush charges us to re-write the traditional Euro-American mythology of the city—one that has forged its identity from a Native American heritage that it has systematically ignored as a vital player in its ongoing urban development. The new place-story, in Thrush’s vision, is one in which Seattle’s

many Native pasts . . . can be unearthed. These place-stories . . . will be dialogues about the transformations of landscape and power in the city and about strategies for living together humanely in this place. Bringing new stories to light and considering how those stories can inform new kinds of action should be our agenda for the future, and it is crafted in the moments when we simply ask each other, What happened here? (207)

 

 

Thrush’s words resonate with our design team, absorbed—as we’ve been—in a re-writing project of our own.  As we begin to call our design proposals “place-stories,” in homage to Thrush, we must consider what they might mean within the context of the National Park Service as a whole. The NPS has a mythic, timeless hold on the American imagination, one that may not always seem human-scale and might not always invite individual collaboration.

To engage all people in national parks, and in San Juan Island National Historical Park in particular, it is essential to provide a relevant park experience that instills a sense of ownership and belonging on an individual level. We believe this can be achieved when people understand that their interactions with a place are part of a much larger—and ongoing—story of human relationships with the land. This is a story, of course, that should be continuously re-written by the people, changing with time.

 

 

We want visitors to our National Historical Park to not only ask What happened here?,  but also What happens here?

Work cited:

Coll Thrush, Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing-Over Place (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008).

WEEK 17: COMMON GROUND TO COMMON THREAD

Last week we discussed the final submission guidelines requiring three presentation board, two written statements and one special item. In preparing mocked up boards, we went through an exercise of prioritizing past ideas (those to keep) and also decided to change the organizing theme from “Common Ground” to “Common Thread.” “Common Thread” will depict the idea of nodes and networks and the interweaving of our concepts between cultural and landscape components of the parks.

Taking this mixing metaphors of “Common Threads” to the three linked boards, the six design principles on the first board can form the needle / threshold which all threads pass through. The second board will focus on the threads, networks and connections that is specific to the island and the site. The concluding board will then showcase our design interventions that can be apply beyond the SJI park and bridging the scales of various parks.

Tasks for the coming week will be going through the course materials produced last quarter and looking for vignettes to weave through our boards. The goal is to have more substantial mock ups for the three boards ready for next weekly discussion.

And this is the last week we have our dearest Carolyn join us for the studio discussion. Carolyn will be on the road working on her new projects. Thank you, Carolyn, for all your great support and prominent inputs. We look forward to sharing our final product with you at the final critique. 

WEEK 16: Portals to the Park

This month we are faced with the BIG TASK of uniting multiple threads of content produced within the studio that ended last month. It brings to mind the immensity of designing for NPS: an enormous agency with an untouchable legacy. One touchstone for us has been the reality that much of the NPS system is comprised of small parks that are pretty firmly embedded in their communities. San Juan Island National Historical Park is familiar, like a favorite aunt, whereas the “Crown Jewel” parks have the arms-length coolness of rock stars. And we are in the lucky position of understanding the complexity of NPS through San Juan Island – an extension of our own backyards here in the Pacific Northwest.

We’ve been framing much of our investigation as one of portals: SJI-NHP is our portal into the NPS system; the park provides a portal to National History through its interpretation of the boundary dispute between the United States and British Canada. The ferry terminal in Anacortes provides an entry point to the San Juan Islands, and pathways within the park create thresholds of ecological understanding. But how do we represent the diverse manifestations of thresholds in a clear, graphic presentation?

Last week, within the pages of the novel River of Smoke, I found a description of portals that may provide some guidance:

…gateways are not merely entrances and exits – they are tunnels between different dimensions of existence. Here, as at the threshold…I was visited by the feeling that I was stepping into a realm that existed on some plane other than the ordinary.

Amitav Ghosh (2011)

WEEK 12-15: Continuing Design, Push to the Finish

Weeks 12-14 for the "Parks for the People" studio group comprised exam week, Spring break and the first week of classes, so we begin with a recap of Week 15.

We are happy to report we have rested and regrouped. Now, as a group of 12, we comprise 8 students, a Ph.D candidate, and our two professors. We have also the consult of Carolyn Law, a talented Seattle artist, and we have also a lot of work to do. 

 

We took this opportunity to assess the work to date, to cull, cut asunder, and collage together our best executed ideas, into a tangle of paper and web of design. We drew strands to NPS design principles, weaved a network together, and then teased the tangle apart.

Armed with scissors, uncompromising critique, and a determination to bring the freshest, strongest ideas forward, we ensured there would be no 'sacred cows' in our final push, and stayed working into the late hours, gripped by the challenge ahead and the catharsis of cutting ties to the past.

 

“What are the 'sacred cows' in the National Park System?” we asked.  In challenging these notions, we look to find where true design innovation resides.

As we make the final push, we grapple with this question, looking for the appropriate solutions or interventions to connect the past, the history of the park with its future.

More updates to come, final submission in less than 5 weeks! 

WEEK 11: FINAL PRESENTATION

After nine weeks of preparation, the day of our final review finally arrived. With late nights leading up to this date, our studio wore the remains of our left over sketches, base maps and other images as we gathered in the atrium below, assembling two areas for our presentations. We greeted our guest reviewers who came from multiple fields of design and management in both the public and private realm and from our College of Built Environments. We were fortunate to have a discerning group of Landscape Architects from the National Park Service and from private firms in Seattle. Several professors of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning were also part of the team of reviewers.

Our presentation began with greetings, acknowledgement of people who offered support, and a review of our team process by our two professors, Ken Yocom and Manish Chalana.

This was followed by a presentation by students of Museum studies, Museology, who gave an overview of the four groups within our student team and the ideas we had brought forward together. The four groups consisted of between three and six students each and represented scales or areas of focus. The Technology Group looked at the use of technology through the journey to the park and at the park; the Island as Park group looked at re-describing the Park’s position; the Site group focused on design on the site and the Structure Group looked at structural form within the site.

The Museology group introduced the team concept of “Common Ground”, an idea that wove through our design interventions and our process of collaboration and integration of community. Four main Narratives were introduced as common within all four groups: the Park’s mandate, ecology, Native American, and local industry.

After an introduction to the history and place of our site, San Juan Island National Historical Park, we had a few minutes to talk with our guests over some snacks and refreshments while viewing the striking black and white photography of John Stamets, Professor of Photography, who has spent considerable time on San Juan Island, at our park site. Our group presentations then began in the Gould Hall Atrium, a wonderful expanse of light on the first floor of our four story building that houses the College of Built Environments.

Two groups presented their projects in each of the two locations followed by a break. The reviewers switched locations and the teams presented a second time, enabling the reviewers to hear all four presentations. Each group presented for fifteen minutes, followed by fifteen minutes of response by the reviewers.

The response by the reviewers was insightful and strong, pointing out the need for more integration among the groups and clarity of the design principles. In the coming weeks a smaller group of student's representing the larger group will pull together those loose threads spotted by the reviewers and channel all our collective efforts into a seamless package.

Congratulations everyone for a job well done! Go out and enjoy a well deserved spring break!!

NPS + Technology

Thank you for joining us on our Informed Journey! We hope visitors will use digital technology to access, generate and share information and experiences.

WEEK 10: REFINEMENT AND FINAL PRESENTATION PREPARATION

This final week of classes has been dedicated to synthesizing and refining our work, looking at the larger implications for NPS, and producing our final presentations. We have spent many a long hour in studio, collaborating within our teams and with other teams to focus our work, identifying overlaps and gaps.

Our studio has settled into five major groups, with some students moving among groups (learning from our design principles - expanding beyond traditional boundaries!).

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Team Museology has synthesized a narrative framework, using feedback from the groups, to highlight four narratives: the Pig War, indigenous peoples, land based stories, and island industry. They use the story of the Pig War and the resolution through peaceful arbitration to interpret these histories, and working with the other groups, identified places in the park where these under-represented stories could be told. They framed their vision for the Park and NPS as a whole to be that "By holistically and critically looking to the past, we can inform and enrich our collective future." This has helped to inform their "Big Idea", or the main message they want visitors to leave with: "San Juan Island is common ground for a multitude of stories."

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Team Island as Park has concentrated on clarifying the structure of their presentation, and creating diagrams that convey their large concept in a straightforward way. They want to emphasize the reach that NPS could have through enhanced partnerships, and show how that could be played out on San Juan Island. San Juan Island National Historical Park could play a pivotal role in re-imagining what collaborative partnerships could look like to create a mutually beneficial future.

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Team Digital has been thinking about it means to visit National Park Service Sites in the 21st century, and what it means to be a visitor at these magnificent places. This means extending the visitor experience beyond simply being at the site, to include their experience learning about and getting to the site, as well as the return back to their homes. They see digital technology as a means to enhance their journey as well as provide access to those who might not otherwise be able to visit. At the same time, there is a recognition that there needs to be an appropriate application of digital technology, one that instills a reverence for place, rather than diminish it.

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Team Site has been dedicated to creating vignettes and diagrams that evoke a sense of place, and help to illustrate, through a variety of ideas, how interpretation on the site can be enhanced and create a more vibrant visitor experience.

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Team Structure has spent some time using the competition design principles to re-examine precedent and the history of architecture in NPS. In doing this, they have created their own set of design principles for building in NPS small parks, and applied those to San Juan Island National Historical Park to create a conceptual design for a visitor’s center on American Camp.

Tomorrow will be the final studio presentation to a jury of design and planning professionals, NPS staff, and professors. Their feedback will guide the development of the final competition submittal to the Van Alen Institute and NPS.

And now, back to the grindstone to perfect our designs, and tweak our presentations!

WEEK 9: NOSE TO THE GRINDSTONE - GIVING FORM / “MAKING IT SO”

This week has been a quiet one in studio SJI-NHP. Over the course of the quarter we’ve done as much talking, researching, gathering, and aggregating as we can, and now we’re on track to produce! Typically, design studios begin producing conceptual and schematic designs much earlier in the quarter. But the nature of this studio demands an incredibly rigorous exploration of the site: its history and ecology, its place within the National Park System, and its relationship with a rapidly changing nation.

Week 9 brings us to the point of testing our research, placing our interpretations of the guidelines in the site; in short, giving form. It is always exciting in studio to bring an idea into being, as it starts to feel and look “real,” and has the power to give observers a glimpse of the ideas we’ve worked so hard to express. But it’s also nerve-wracking at times: what does it look like when we frame a view on the site? What is a signifier when experienced in a place?

Despite an eagerness to dive into production, each of the groups has worked hard to stay in communication with one another, ensuring a fluid and consistent approach as we create our final deliverables. With our overarching conceptual approach established (‘Common Ground’), smaller-scale group work has remained as dynamic as ever.

Our final studio reviews next Monday are rapidly approaching; a sense of urgency has ushered in fast paced, strategic decisions. We struggle to visually represent succinct mission objectives, critiques of the current NPS operating model and suggested solutions that apply across time and space.

taj & helen

WEEK 8: AS WE NEAR THE FINISH, A SEARCH FOR COMMON GROUND

“To acknowledge past human impacts upon these islands is not to call into question their wildness; it is rather to celebrate, along with the human past, the robust ability of wild nature to sustain itself when people give it the freedom it needs to flourish in their midst.”

- William Cronon, The Riddle of the Apostle Islands (williamcronon.net/writing/Cronon_Riddle_Apostle_Islands.htm)

After a marathon week of lectures, critiques that stretched the limits of grit and endurance, and the looming urgency of the quarter’s end a mere 3 weeks away, we emerged to find ourselves at a crossroads.

Where do we go from here?

We were in search of a common framework, a common sense of purpose; we were looking for [a]common ground.

This idea – that of San Juan Island National Historical Park as common ground – became a focus of our work for the week, as we broke into final working groups and developed our critiques of business as usual for our park and the National Park System as a whole.

Out of our discussion, a new working group emerged to consider the National Park System in the realm of digital technologies and communication. This group will assess the effectiveness of the site and the system in relation to the digital fluencies and desires of future generations of park users.

Finally, as the studio winds down (or ramps up, as the case may be) we will be working to bring the specificities of our site analysis into a larger conceptual framework – or idea – for the future of the National Park System.

Here, we will need to be reflective with regard to how our local site reflects larger themes across the American landscape, the natural and cultural preservation of which it is the NPS’s charge to uphold.

What does the space of SJINHP tell us about the American experience?

SJINHP offers a message of cultural peace and natural sanctity across a landscape that is common ground for competing narratives, shifting ecologies, histories layered atop the other, stories dens-ifying and dispersing as if buffeted by the swirling winds atop the bluffs and on the beaches of American Camp.

We’ve heard the story of the Pig War, of peaceful arbitration and recognize it as but one of the stories to celebrate here, only one part of the American cultural landscape and we are cognizant of other voices in the midst – the whispers of the Lummi oars and the hot smoke of burning prairies; the plodding and plowing of early American settlers reaping an agricultural bounty; and more recently the encroachment of suburban development along with the whir of the automobile.

We search for space to hold [in]common our [un]common histories; in the landscape we seek the tension of our diverse pasts grounded in the unity of our American democracy.

WEEK 7: STAKEHOLDER SYNTHESIS + DESIGN DIRECTIONS

This polar bear tells a personal story

On Monday, we began the our weekly seminar session with an enlivening presentation and discussion with Kris Morrissey, Director of the Museology Department, Curator of Interpretation. She emphasized that interpretation is the bridge between the visitor and the information. While objects provoke stories, only people can “tell” stories. This is important, as Kris stated that the story is what forges emotional and intellectual connections between the interests of the audience and the meaning inherent in the resources. Her expertise on interpretation is certainly an invaluable resource, and the timing of her visit couldn’t have been more perfect as we begin to consolidate our ideas concerning specific areas and modes of telling stories.

Kris Morrissey from the Museology Department



New groups

After Kris’ time with us, we were tasked with self-aligning into groups based on our 3 new focus themes: Density, Dispersal, and Connections. Within these newly formed groups, our directive was to synthesize what we heard from the visiting jurors at the mid-review and the stakeholders and bring that into a still conceptual framework for moving forward.

Students' designs - NEW or modified NPS logo

Following class Monday, we all pinned up our designs for a new NPS logo, which had been a fun part of our weekend assignment to get our creative sense awakened.


Wednesday began with a class visit to the UW’s Burke Museum where Julia Stein, Curator of the Burke, gave us an amazing presentation. We heard about the museum’s collections related the Park and the work she and her students have done on the sites, which include archeological digs done in the area of the parade ground at English Camp. 

Julia Stein, Curator of the Burke Museum

There was also an informative exhibit entitled: Hungry Planet: What the World Eats. Included in this exhibit was a very thorough and beautiful explanation of the seasonally and geographically varied diet of the Coast Salish People, who have inhabited the San Juan Islanda for thousands of years. We continued studio in work sessions within our new groups, with collaborations and ideas exchanges occurring between groups.

Julia Stein showed us her work and artifacts found on the San Juan Island

On Friday, we had the pleasure to have Keith Dunbar, retired head of the NPS Planning for the Western Region and coauthor of the SJI-NHP general management plan come and give us a presentation on the history and evolution of park planning and policy. Keith stayed to observe and provide feedback on our pin-up session, where our groups presented to the class our ideas for design directions. Many of our creative ideas and potentials for implementation saw similarities and parallels which will inform our direction toward synthesis, editing and clarification in moving forward. 

Keith Dunbar, Retired Head of NPS Planning of our region

The Connection Group presenting their design directions

STAR your favorite "Big Ideas"

WEEK 6: MID-REVIEW + STAKEHOLDER MEETING

This week for the studio began with late nights spent feverish polishing our mid-review presentations, and ended with another site visit to bucolic San Juan Island.  While I believe we all preferred the latter, our mid-reviews came off grandly nonetheless. 

We further distilled our working themes to four groups:  Community + Stakeholders, Site + Program, Heritage + Program, and Setting + Environment.  These groups were, as our professors tasked us, an effort to "move into a more directed apprach for developing strategies to apply the design guidelines to our site and examine their applicability to the larger NPS system."  While moving forward in examining their individual theme, the groups also worked together, sharing ideas and information to devise a framework for decision-making in our design thinking.

Here are a few examples of our work (please note, more examples will be posted in the coming days):



We were fortunate to have as our reviewers both SJI-NHP core staff and high level decision-makers with the Designing the Parks competition.  After a short introduction to our work and process, the four groups presented their boards detailing thoughts and proposals.  A final synthesis presentation discussed overall conclusions, and clued the reviewers in to our direction moving forward.

A fertile discussion followed, with the reviewers urging us to continue pushing and scrutinizing the boundaries of the Park, both physical and metaphorical.  They appreciated all of the data and analysis that was presented, and all - reviewers, students, and professors - agreed that it is now time to bring focus to form. 

After the buzz of mid-review dissipated for a day, we had a second chance to present our work - this time on the Island.  We invited community stakeholders to a public meeting as a way to see what we have been working on, and more importantly to get input from those who have the Park as their local park.  We were all very excited, after working with GIS, historical research, maps, et al. for weeks, to have a chance to have tangible encounters with island residents. 

Steve, Acting Superintendent of SJI-NHP introducing the group

There was a short presentation, and we then broke out into small groups to discuss our work and the residents' thoughts.

At the end of the long week, we blew off some steam in Friday Habor at the Rumor Mill, a live music venue and restaurant.  As the band was backed by a large mural of the windswept prairie at American Camp, we considered our dancing and revelry as research related to the studio.

At the Rumor Mill - with American Camp prairie mural backdrop

The next day, we further explored the Island and the two park sites.  With fresh ideas from our presentations and conversations, the group homed in on how to bring these concepts to spatial reality.  A subset was able to examine the old military road in further detail, and more specifically toured the island with the San Juan Island Trails Committee.

English Camp

English Camp

English Camp

American Camp

American Camp

American Camp

Jakle's Lagoon - American Camp

American Camp

With the quarter a bit more than halfway over, we look forward to focusing more on specific proposals and interventions built upon the base of thorough site analysis and data.