This course extends your ecological design experience into work at a master planning and site planning and design scale, furthering your design skills, continuing your planning process and approach to design and builds upon the technical and design foundation from your first year. This class is designed to help connect your planning and design skills you have developed or will develop in courses such as Site Engineering, Materials and Methods, and Planting Design. To accomplish this, a project has been selected that will afford you the opportunity to undertake a site planning-scale project that will extend beyond master site planning and into conceptual / schematic design.

This studio’s primary project will focus upon the development of design and planning proposals for a 118.39-acre mixed use development utilizing sustainable design principles as both a framework for, and inspiration for, an innovative, sustainable, inspiring and inclusive community located in York Township, in Washtenaw County. The site is bounded on the West by US 23, to the North by Willis Road, and the East by Carpenter Road.

The program for development will be provided in class.

The first phase of the semester will build upon the ecological design principles taught in your first year. You will visit the project site and develop a site analysis diagram(s) that outlines the site’s opportunities and constraints which will become the basis for the master site plan. Upon completion of the Site Inventory and Analysis, the studio will then focus on the development of a Master Site Plan for the entire site, per a project supplied program. Work in this studio will focus upon the overall site scale for the first phase of studio, with students working to develop specific parcels within the property for a mix of uses, develop land use relationships, layout roads, infrastructure strategies, and ultimately visualize them for comment and critique. 

Phase Two will ask students to continue to develop their ideas while also moving down in scale to think about specific area designs, details, materials and more. Ultimately, students will produce an abbreviated set of Conceptual/Schematic Design Documents that include details and other supporting documents illustrating the project development.