Troubled Waters Arroyo Rehabilitation Center
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SITE PLAN 1/64” = 1’-0”
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FLOOR PLAN 1/32” = 1’-0”
DWELLING
C A N A L C I R C U L AT I O N
R I PA R I A N T R I G G E R
R E H A B I L I TAT I O N S PA C E
SHORT CIRCUIT EVENT
Desert Hot Springs, California is a town plauged with infrastructure and societal problems. Crime is 60% higher per capita than the national average, and druge usage is nearly twice the national rate. The resulting conditions has left a vacuum for lower income, often drug-addicted, population groups with little access to proper mental health care and drug rehabilitation service. In addition to the bleak social conditions, Desert Hot Springs also faces an infrastructure crises with access to clean water. While the city is widely known for its natural mineral hot springs and healing waters, underground aquifers providing non-alkali drinking water are rapidly diminishing at unstainable levels. While a glut of hot springs water exists below the surface, it cannot be consumed or used in agricultur without proper treatment. What little rain does occur causes flash floods in the unrecptive desert landscape and much-needed water simply turns to runoff. The Arroyo Rehabilitation Center is situated on the Miracle Hill desert wash, in close proximity to the first well drilled by town founder Cabbot Yerxa in the 19th Century. The 30unit rehabilitation complex, anchored by view corri dors two prominent peaks,, features inpatient mental health care and rehabilitation spaces. Cut through the middle by a wash and isected by a 6’ deep concrete circulation channel, the architecture leverage the topography of the land to capture pools of healing water and channel them to the dry wash. Runoff is captured and spurs the formation of a ripirian desert ecosystem, while still bowing to the brutal natural force of the flooding wash, causing a short circuit in the landscape.As patients cross the wash daily, they are struck with a sense of absence and presence, void and solid, emptiness and completion, and the raw ciclical forces of nature. A parallax shift gradually occurs as the patient, anchored in the landscape, experience the power of selfactualization and spiritual renewal.
ADE 622: Spring 2016 Advanced Architectural Studio IV
“We must renounce all attempts to reduce one aspect to the other, or, even more, to enact a kind of synthesis of the opposites; the task is, on the contrary, 1/2 tomileconceive all possible positions as responses to a certain underlying deadlock or antagonism, as so many attempts to
short circuit this deadlock”
--Slavoj Zizek
Students: Braden Blake, Scott Morgan Instructor: Claudio Vekstein