Below are a small selection of projects where I applied my unique skills and experience as a Futurist, Facilitator and Planner in order to facilitate the pre-design of these distinctive architectural environments. As you review these projects you will see interactive links that, when clicked on, will allow you to gain a deeper understanding of the tools and processes that I used to facilitate the planning/pre-design of these projects. Directly below this introduction is a list of the projects catalogued in this portfolio. You can choose to click on any of these project titles to jump directly to a specific project, or simply scroll down to begin a review of the first project:
Barabara Cardwell Career Preparatory Center
Irving Independent School District, Irving, TX
Central Administration Building
Frisco Independent School District, Frisco, TX
Corporate Headquarters
Big Thought, Dallas, TX
Planning a Renovation of Barbara Cardwell Career Preparatory Center
Irving Independent School District, Irving, TX
Planning and Architecture Services Provided By: SHW Group, Plano, TX
Planning took place between: August 2008 and October 2008
The education of youth, especially of disadvantaged people, is so extremely wise and useful, that, to a humane and generous mind, no expense for this purpose would be thought extravagant.
~John Adams
In order to better understand the unique needs of the students, teachers, and administrators at the Cardwell Career Preparatory Center, I served as a part-time teacher at the original school facility.
Around the mid 19th century families from diverse religious backgrounds settled in an area outside of Dallas, Texas with the unified goal to create a “school for their children”. The first teacher at this “union” school was “a man named Bowers”. Thus, this community of education pioneers appropriately became known as Union Bower, Texas. Around 1960, the city of Irving annexed the town of Union Bower. With the surrounding community founded on the basis of a school designed for a unique group of students, Union Bower Center for Learning, recently renamed, the Barbara Cardwell Career Preparatory Center (BCCPC) is not just a school for at-risk students—it’s more appropriately described as a school for non-traditional learning. With such a rich history, the Cardwell Career Preparatory Center strives to fulfill its’ core mission “to successfully empower and graduate (at-risk) students in a non-traditional environment focused on personalized, quality core instruction, career pathways, and real world experiences.”
To that end, my charge, while serving as the Lead Planner on this project, was to facilitate Irving ISD and BCCPC administrators, teachers, and students through the pre-design process so that the architectural design team could, in-turn successfully develop design solutions for the unique adaptive re-use and renovation of this important school facility.
The first step in the pre-design process was to collect as much information from key district and campus administrators about the school’s curricular goals. Specifically, the curriculum had recently been reorganized into five career pathways in order to prepare the student population for specific careers upon graduation. As a result of this initial Data-Finding Session, a diagram was developed to help the design team better understand how the learning spaces should be organized so as to best support the core curriculum and career pathway learning.
During this Adjacency Analysis I used the tool of Gaming Chips to better understand the goals that a group of students from the Barbara Cardwell Career Preparatory Center had for the redesign of the campus facility.
Following the initial information collection and analysis, I then facilitated two distinct groups through an Adjacency Analysis in order to gain an even more detailed understanding of the educational and organization goals that should most influence the arrangement of spaces. The Administrators’ Adjacency Analysis was created by a group of district and campus administrators, and The Students’ Adjacency Analysis was created by a selection of BCCPC students.
The administrators (as well as the teachers from the BCCPC campus) had goals that included: decentralizing science laboratories in order to keep the career pathways organized as distinct learning communities; and, each career pathway learning community, or House, should have a unique common area where students counseling, meet with teachers, and commune with other students on the same career pathway–to name a few.
Some of the goals that students highlighted during their adjacency analysis included: administrative staff should be more accessible to the students; the main entry should be adjacent to the dining room; and, the classrooms used for Visual Arts/Communications should be directly adjacent to the library in order to better facilitate student research for those courses (a goal that the administrative staff had never known to be important to students).
As the planning process came to an end, it culminated in the production of a Creative Brief (an interactive document designed to help facilitate the transition from planning/problem-finding to design/solution-finding). This Creative Brief includes specific pieces with the overall goal to introduce the designers to the unique Architectural Design Problems that should all be solved with Architectural Solutions in order to produce a comprehensive design solution that will meet the needs of the users. The Creative Brief for the Barbara Cardwell Career Preparatory Center includes the following pieces: Design Mission; Design Goals; Design Data (i.e. Key Terms, Pertinent TEA Guidelines); Initial Site Investigation; Adjacency Analyses; and most importantly, Architectural Design Problems.
Planning a New Central Administration Building
Frisco Independent School District, Frisco, TX
Planning and Architecture Services Provided By: SHW Group, Plano, TX
Planning took place between: October 2008 and December 2008
As part of the planning process, I facilitated the development of the Design Mission that would help drive the entire planning and design process.
As Frisco ISD began to grow in an accelerating pace, it became clear that the districts administrative arm needed to be more centralized under one roof in order to better serve the community.
To design a unique environment driven by a civic-minded approach to the serious business of education in Frisco.
During the development of the Design Mission for the Frisco Central Administration Building we first analyzed the mission statement of Frisco Independent School District. I continued facilitating the Design Mission development by paying attention to concepts that are central to Frisco ISD. These concepts were gathered through intense dialogue with district administrators at all levels as well as each member of the district’s Board of Trustees. Finally, by focusing on the values of Frisco ISD, I was able to facilitate the creation of a more meaningful Design Mission.
Utilizing a derivation of the "gaming chips" tool that was first used by Robert Douglas Associates for planning healthcare facilities--I facilitated the use of this three-dimensional adjacency analysis tool in order to determine the most optimal way to organize the many unique administrative offices of Frisco ISD under one roof.
Through continuous dialogue with district administrators–including intense hands-on research into office procedures, along with other members of the project team, I began to explore the best allocation of the necessary square footage. This exploration began with a simple sketch on an interactive white board, and ended with a three-dimensional adjacency analysis (as shown in the picture to the left).
After assigning departments to an appropriate floor, it was then necessary to meet with each department in order understand their unique requirements in regards to space planning and organization. Throughout each of these meetings an interactive, digital version of gaming chips of utilized in order to visually capture each departments’ goals and needs with respect to how work spaces should be arranged. As a result of this tool, these diagrams were able to continually evolve as new information was gathered. All-in-all, the planning process utilized for this project continually informed the design team and in turn positively impacted design solutions.
Planning a new Corporate Headquarters
Big Thought – Nonprofit Arts Education Organization, Dallas, TX
www.bigthought.org
Planning Services Provided By: Blake S. Godkin, Independent Consultant
Planning began in August 2009 and is still in progress
The best way to understand the planning process that I facilitated for this project, is to first understand the mission of Big Thought. While there mission is “to make imagination a part of everyday learning”–the following video will help you better understand the people that are at the heart of fulfilling this mission.
After the leaders of Big Thought went through an intense visioning process (facilitated by Danny Modisette , an expert organizational strategist), I was approached to help facilitate Big Thought through the planning and pre-design of a new corporate headquarters that would better serve the needs of their staff, partners and stakeholders. My first goal was to review the results that came from the visioning process: a collection of findings (core beliefs) and directions (strategic actions), in order to determine which of these Findings & Directions had potential Facilities Implications.
After reviewing the Finding--"Organization of spaces is a reflection of the culture of Big Thought" and the related Facilities Implication--"Gathering spaces for: collaboration, social learning and celebration" this sculpture was used to talk about what became the Design Criteria--"Idea development must be visible to all employees; and, all main work areas should surround a larger space".
With those facilities implications in hand, I then facilitated Big Thought through a series of exercises in order to develop specific criteria that would eventually drive the design of the new corporate headquarters. These exercises, based on the process of Lego Serious Play, force clients to literally build metaphors that serve as catalysts for triggering connections between abstract concepts and concrete requirements. The goal of this part of the pre-design process being–to ensure that the Design Criteria be directly inspired by the Facilities Implications and ergo the Findings & Directions.
At this point, I analyzed the dialogue that came out of the Lego exercises in order to finalize the Design Criteria. With the Design Criteria, I assembled the Executive Management Team at Big Thought in order to prioritize the Design Criteria. Recently, I presented these prioritized Criteria to Big Thought’s Facilities Task Force so that they could immediately direct a real estate broker, as well as their external partners to begin a search for spaces that could successfully be designed to meet the requirements of the Design Criteria. The next step will be to facilitate Big Thought through the creation of an RFP that can be used to find an appropriate architecture firm that can successfully move the project forward.
