Today was a workshop day! Unfortunately Kirill, Necils and Tom couldn’t make it to this meeting. Kirill was still in San Francisco and Necils and Tom had to go to work. For the past week Necils and I tried various ways (lots of trial and errors) to cut glass bottles. We tried lighting a string on fire with acetone and a flame and dunking it into ice cold water; that didn’t work. We tried scoring the glass bottle with solely a glass cutter tool and our hands, which came out wobbly. Scoring took about 30 minutes by hand, and then we tried putting a flame along the scoreline and then running cold water over it. We also tried dunking a heated and scored bottle in the pool a few times. All our trials came to broken glasses that shattered discontinuously around the scoreline. Necils however had some success after many tries of patiently scoring and lighting then cooling. Later on, I decided to watch a few more videos on youtube to see if there were any more ways to cut the glass without an expensive machine or too much effort (that would probably discourage the community). I luckily found one that showed a simple machine this man made by simply putting wood together and drilling in his glass cutter utensil into the wood so that when he rolled the bottle, the perfect amount of force and pressure were applied to the bottle and the anticipated scoreline. I attempted to make my own device. With the help of gorilla glue and epoxy I was able to glue some left over pieces of wood together. I then added the glass cutter utensil to the equation. I let go of my fears and decided to epoxy the $2 glass cutter into the mix, and waited an hour for that to dry. Then, the moment of truth came upon me: I put a clear glass bottle down and rotated it. To my surprise and joy, the bottle scored pretty well and when I went to test how it would break, it was a complete success. The method I tried was simply scoring it, then pouring very hot water over the score, then cold water, then hot water, then cold water again until it broke or until I felt confident enough to pop it off. It was magic. I felt like I was doing a little experiment. Needless to say, science is pretty cool. On Monday, I did a small demonstration and Arturo translated my explanation of the process and how easy it was to do it. Everyone understood and I got a lot of positive feedback. The community was very impressed and they found it to be creative. It was a successful day.

 

 

Necils, Tom and I packed up our computers and headed over to the garden. We met up with Saul and the community to listen to their updates. Unfortunately Kirill couldn’t be there because he had to go home to visit his family in San Francisco. Maria brought up the fact that the person who had the tractor wasn’t answering any phone calls. That worried us a bit, but Arturo did mention that he knew someone else who has one that we could possibly ask. Our team got really excited when Maria brought out our mini posters of various sustainable strategies and talked about the different ideas we had. As a whole many of the community members felt some concern about the potential leakage of arsenic from the tires, but we backed up the tire idea with the possible solution of putting adobe over the tires. Adobe will also gives it a very pleasant aesthetic. The community is all for the recycling of glass bottles for retaining walls as well as making mixed-in paper cement or paper adobe bricks. A couple more ideas were also introduced: using earthen structures such as hay bale and sand bags (in potato sacks). Although many people were on both sides for the shipping containers, Arturo made a great argument that proposing this idea will not only make a statement but it will set precedent in this community. According to Arturo, no one has ever proposed shipping container structures in Ontario. It is on us to take the initiative and really work hard at getting every piece of information we can about the regulations and positive outcomes of the shipping containers. On a side note, some of the community members (even a couple kids) were helping weld together an arch for the walkway. Anyways, we left the meeting and got some drinks at Tortas Sinaloas and then tried a new place to eat that combined Chinese food and Mexican food together. Personally Tortas Sinaloas was yummier, but new places are always worth a try. We came back home and planned our goals for the next week.

 

Kirill, Tom and I headed over to the City Hall of Ontario to meet up with Arturo. We parked, said our hellos and looked for Karen Thompson to discuss the master plan with. By the fifth minute we were there Karen came over to talk to us. Arturo introduced us to her and we listened intently to what she had to say. Her affable personality was inviting but she did make sure that we were to follow up with elevations and renderings that would illustrate how the structures are going to be made. Luckily she gave us permission to begin building the areas that were previously discussed. They were impressed by our work thankfully, and we left feeling accomplished, although we knew we had a lot of work ahead of us.

Here you can download the siteplan as it was on Thursday,  July 3rd:

High Resolution JPEG image

Vector PDF File

Rhino File

 

 

Despite the uneasy feelings after our impromptu meeting with Max, today wasn’t as unsuccessful as we thought it would be. I remember Kirill asking me if I was at all excited after he saw the discouraged look on my face after almost fainting at the notorious Ontario Wheelhouse. I say notorious for one main reason: it’s cursed. Well it’s not really cursed, but it brings us bad luck. Almost every time we visit the wheelhouse something bad happens.

We were one of the architecture student groups of Cal Poly Pomona tasked with the creation of a bike shelter installation, and we first came across the wheelhouse when we were looking for bike frames for our structure. The Ontario Wheelhouse is a grassroots community organization ironically funded by the Pitzer College that allows anybody to fix their bikes for free thereby promoting the use of bicycles for transportation. They gave us 12 bike frames for free and when the project was done, we were so grateful for their help, we decided to donate our bike shelter to them. At the end of the semester, Kirill broke his collar bone when we were trying to relocate the structure and the next day, their dog was hit by a truck as we were assembling it on their front lawn. All of this was to no avail, as a year later we discovered that it only took them a month to saw it up and sell it for scraps.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We came back on June 21st, almost a year since we last talked to Max, with something different in mind. This summer, we planned to work with organizations that are aligned with our interests; primarily environmental and social justice organizations which could provide us with a design opportunity. Max and the Ontario Wheelhouse mentioned several small opportunities that we could potentially design for. Kirill then inquired about a garden or a farm that Max mentioned he worked with a year ago. We spent several hours cleaning and truing wheels; waiting until the garden, or huerta, was going to open. This is around the time when I started to losing my balance and sense of consciousness. So Kirill and I called it a day and headed out to get some food at Max’s recommended taqueria to alleviate my ill state.

We arrived at the garden and that’s when Kirill questioned my enthusiasm. It took us nearly half an hour to get out of the car, but we finally did and moments after walking in a woman by the name of Maria approached us and asked us what we were there for. We introduced ourselves and were overjoyed by her welcoming and enthusiastic aura. The moment we said “architecture students” she lit up and immediately said that has work for us. We were to come back Monday and participate in a community meeting for what was to become the redevelopment plan of the 3-acre site.