waimea-nui community development

The Waimea-Nui Community Development project was a collaborative project that involved our entire studio (15 students) in an exciting first attempt at tackling an architectural problem at both micro and macro scales.

We traveled to Hawaii as a group, specifically to Waimea on the Big Island. Some key cultural themes that were important to the Natives included the usage of lava rock, thatched rooves, native hawaiian canoes, and sacred customs. Along with these aspects was the people’s firm desire to be able to identify as a distinct cultural community instead of being stereotyped into Polynesian culture as a whole. As a result, our project became an eclectic conglomeration of 15 students’ ideas and thoughts through the scope of what the native Hawaiians wanted: a cemetary, a chapel, a cultural center, a health center, a senior living center, and an agricutlure center.

The key element that was developed in order to connect our site to the rest of Waimea was a massive “green network” (previous page). The green network would function not only as a transportation medium that connects the site to the rest of the area but also as an opportunity to build upon important sustainability ideals that the natives wanted to promote about the way that they live and function on a day-to-day basis. These renderings below were made using Podium with some fairly heavy post-processing in Photoshop. A more abstract approach was used for the backgrounds of the perspective views, using a collaged effect of the distant mountain forms taken from trip photos.