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.

Today we attended the weekly meeting at the community garden. We brought Maria a print of the siteplan and the initial designs. Currently Hana is designing the seating area as a circular amphitheater with retaining walls made out of rammed earth tires. For the buildings, we are thinking of using shipping containers either in a single-story or double-stacked fashion. While waiting for the city to respond to our siteplan proposal, we decided to go forward with our design of the major structures. Currently we are working on making a connection with a structural engineer as well as with a licensed architect who could potentially sign off on the drawings and aid us in making a formal proposal to the city in order to obtain building permits.

 

The work presented this day is available here:

Folder

 

Today we went to the Ontario City Hall in order to submit changes made to the siteplan, primarily the city wanted to see the adjacent parcel uses through a satellite overlay, using it to analyze whether or not the proposed uses for the site. Elaboration was needed on the water cistern so we added that as well. Karen Thompson was very receptive to the changes, but she said that it was problematic to propose a shipping container as a habitable building due to the fact that the planning code as well as the building code of Ontario prohibits such use. We decided to go forward and submit a proposal and attempt to convince the city to allow the use for shipping containers as well as exposed tires.

 

The files we submitted today can be found here:

Folder

With overlay:

JPEG

PDF

Without overlay:

JPEG

PDF

Today, Hana, Necils and I went to the weekly community meeting. Few people actually showed up for this one, largely because Maria was not there. The regulars attended however, but when we arrived everyone was just working their plots. We talked with Arturo, watered the worm bins and Necils turned over the compost in order to aerate it.

 

After working on the garden for a little bit we showed Arturo our progress on the renderings and design for the built structures in the center of the garden, namely the: the library, pavilion/stage, shaded structure, kitchen and mechanical.

Arturo was excited and suggested that the pavilion should be more multipurpose and that we should research the toxicity of the recycled materials we plan to use such as tires and the shipping containers. We also discussed meeting with the City the next day in order to submit revisions to the siteplan.

 

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

 

 

We arrived fairly late, about 40 minutes late, to the community meeting. Tom and Saul came earlier. Hana and I were stuck at home putting on some finishing touches and printing the siteplan.

 

When we arrived at the community meeting, the meeting hadn’t yet started so thankfully we had time to present our drawing. We were thanked for our efforts and the meeting continued as usual, outlining events in the area that are of interest to the community in order to build a stronger connection across social movements. Several of these events were presented, all of which required the attendance of members of the community.

 

 

One of the agenda items was to address the compost. The community garden gets donations from a produce company of rotten vegetables, these are funneled into the compost, a truckload a week from what we’ve seen so far. Today’s load was 12 pallets, approximately. These were mangos, squash, cucumbers, melons. Everything had been rotting in the truck for several days, and the load was half liquid. The truck itself was covered in mold and flies. A group of around 25 people tackled around 6 or 7 pallets, and the work for us personally was exhausting.

 

 

Before we left, we consulted Arturo and Maria and the community about the changes we were to make. Several small things were mentioned and the date was set for Wednesday to submit the drawings to the city for review.

Our favorite — Tortas Sinaloa after a long day.

 

 

Today, the previous days, as well as the following days were spent on creating the site plan. We drew precisely what the community requested, and this is in preparation for the following Monday community meeting.

 

 

This is our first attempt at submitting drawings to the city, so we are fairly nervous about making everything as legible and code-compliant as possible.

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.