02 The SHOP
INTEGRATIONS
spring ‘23


Allensworth, California

Team: 

Marianna (Hollie) Sikes 

Shakori Carpenter

Professor:

Kevin Stevens Following the 2023 Architecture at Zero’s guidelines, a design competition for decarbonization, equity, and resilience in California, teams were instructed to design a farm technology lab with residential units for farming students. The project was situated in Allensworth, a quaint town in southern California. Being one of the first Black settlements established in the United States, Allensworth has persevered through constant stints of systemic racism, territorial oppression, and abrasive climatic conditions. Despite its challenges, Allensworth still, to this day, has a strong and loving community that inspires admiration for its history. The implementation of the SHOP puts itself third to that of Allensworth and its residents, acting as an impetus for community revitalization, not as a "solution.”




The architecture was not meant to only speak to the spatial conditions of the site—its vastness, flatness, and ostensible disjointedness—but the social landscape as well. It is important that residents feel a sense of ownership over the Shop. Through exploring collective memory, histories of rulemaking and breaking (both physically and sociologically), and local ethos and identity, this Allensworth-focused project will work to keep in line with resonant cultural themes of both the past and the present. In designing it, we asked ourselves what supportive architecture is and how it takes form over a variety of scales and contexts. The response to this question was through the introduction of a floating roof with an assembly of static and fluid wall systems. This transforms the Shop from a standard teaching space into an adaptive tool able to shrink and expand, producing a workable area based on how it needs to be utilized on a day-to-day basis.



Site plan + Infographic - Shakori/Hollie
Wall translucency illustration 
Folding wall diagram - Hollie / Shakori
Exploded axon of wall composite - Hollie
Structure joinery diagram - Hollie
Rain to Grey to Field Comic
The Architecture at Zero competition required all submitted projects to produce zero or offset carbon emissions. As a result of this rule, the team made conscious design decisions regarding material selection and resource allocation, passive to low-energy active lighting and cooling systems, and solar panel employment. Rather than stopping there, moves were made to research techniques that turned consumption into production. For instance, utilizing waste water collection tanks, grey water, and a bioseptic system is a mechanism that allows for human waste to be reduced and refined so that it can be reused as plant fertilizer. All components come together to produce a structure that fits the material composition of the landscape without imposing on the community.

Programmatic Diagram - Hollie
Exterior Perspective
Interior Perspective
Student showing their parents the farm - Hollie
Students working the land - Hollie
Local children receving a lesson - Hollie

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