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.

WEEK 5: STEWARDSHIP + COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT

To kick off the week, we had an exciting opportunity to work with Jodie Galvan of Forterra (formerly Cascade Land Conservancy) to discuss the process and implications of environmental stewardship. As a Senior Managing Director of Stewardship, Jodie works to ensure that the land managed by Forterra is maintained and restored as needed, a complicated job that involves budgeting for thousands of acres of land in the Pacific Northwest. She emphasized the complexity of this responsibility by asking us to brainstorm a number of critical components of San Juan Island National Historical Park that we will need to take into consideration as we begin making recommendations for the re-design of this site. These components included:

1. Long-term management and maintenance needs, including things that may go wrong and preventative measures
2. Cost per year to run the park
3. How to reduce those costs
4. Non-financially-based benefits of utilizing community volunteers in the park

The estimates for the cost to maintain the park largely exceeded the probable budget. This is where reducing 
costs and community stewardship comes into play. As a class, we agreed that the benefits of utilizing community volunteers extends beyond cost reductions, as it allows for education of the public as well as maintaining old and new partnerships throughout the island community.

On Monday we also had the chance to present the work we produced for our most recent assignment. We had been split into four teams to accomplish a number of goals that allow us to dig a little deeper into the history, site, setting, and program of the park. The history team displayed a montage of histories, including that of the Pig War, the Native Americans, and even the geology of the island and region as a whole. The site team displayed the structure, ecology, and cultural resources of American Camp and English Camp as individual places. This was taken to a broader level by the setting team, who illustrated the land use, ecology, transportation, and tourism aspects of the entire island as it relates to the rest of the region. Finally, the program team explored the earth, water, and human interactions on the island, and identified areas of opportunity for visitors to explore and learn from the park.

After eliciting the broader, more abstract ideas revolving around the various components of the park and island, it is time for us to complete a foundation from which we can begin applying the design principles. The rest of the week was spent working on three main issues: Site and Program, Heritage and Program, and Setting and Environment. Based on the preliminary stages of our exploration of these issues, a main theme among the three teams seems to involve discovering the linkages and commonalities between various narratives, relationships, and physical properties of the park and the island.  By identifying common threads, it will be easier for us to define the needs of the island, the park, the tourists, the residents, the stakeholders, and the natural ecologies.

The heritage + program group brainstorms.

To organize themes, students in the heritage + program and 
site + program groups gather all the different narratives that are 
held within the two camps.

Project management + presentation group begins outlining for the midterm review.

In preparation for the stakeholder meeting on February 10, each student is responsible for contacting community stakeholders on San Juan Island. Organizations and citizens interested in the future of San Juan Island National Historical Park are encouraged to attend.