Spicket River Greenway Project, Lawrence, MA : teaching & learning design with the community

Abstract

This research deals with three different issues. The first two, a site and a community, with their own possibilities and constrains, are going to be the protagonists of this adventure. The third one, the architect-planner, trying to play the role of a facilitator in the process, will translate their needs, rules and solutions into a comprehensive plan that should be suitable for the other two. Interpreting the rules of design, as a tool, the architect here would like to perform his role as a medieval alchemist, acting and waiting in expectation, trying not to interfere to allow the process to flow, but aware that transformations also involves oneself. The main source for this research is the teaching-learning experience at the Young Architects Program, with whom the author is going to share the discovery of the site and the envisioning of a better future. His personal goal is to explore the intimate relationship between ideal form, originated in the minds and images of each one of us, compared with the possibilities for realization after the filter of social, political and economic forces. This will be a teaching and learning experience to confront utopia and reality, within a given urban design problem. The experience of the first four months has been recorded in seven chapters and six journals, that in the form of a diary, carry the observations and reflections of the first approach to the case studied, as the result of the everyday contact with the space and the people.