Year November 2022

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Program Mixed-use Landscape

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Location Knoxville, Tennessee

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Studio Ryan Jones, Lake Flato by BarberMcMurry Architects 

To define a sense of community in a “post” downtown Knoxville where the dichotomy between urban life and nature is celebrated through movement, comfort, intimacy, and creativity.

 

Picture yourself in your childhood home on a cool Saturday afternoon in the early days of Fall. You run outside to meet up with your family in your suburban, cookie cutter backyard. As your father parks his truck, sister drives up with her bicycle, your mother is finishing up her virtual yoga lesson and you begin helping everyone prepare for your annual family barbecue.

Setting this scene at a larger scale would mimic ideas of neighborhood gatherings or even block parties. Even larger would equate to the mannerisms of a park, minus the existence of a building, vehicle, etc. The dichotomy constructed between nature and “urbanity” is one that defies the complexities that rise from both realities and calls for a lack of innovation and a sufficiency of sterile environments. The narrative of green over grey or grass over concrete enables the settling of differences without allowing them to exist, rather than allowing the multiplicity of spaces find an identity that is ever-changing or “becoming”.
In a Civic space that completely redefines the preconceived notions of the word “Civic”, the redesigned built environment will appropriate invisible boundaries that allow for the flourishing of any ecosystem in a multi-beneficial system. This space is a space of gathering, it is one that taps into the five senses, it calls for a reinvented system of activities that attract all kinds of habitats.

Where the entry point of the space creates a separation between the residential quarters and the Civic space, the stage hub unusually acts as the central point of gathering. The activities that form the second station test out a more elevated program that houses a unique relationship between architecture and theatre that allows for a more open and public use of the space where transparency, structure, and materiality take charge alongside the subspaces that benefit the primary zones on the mezzanine and main floors.