OVERLAY

Elmhust district has an extremely high proportion of children in overal population, comparing to USA or even Oakland. On the other hand, the district is facing problems of basic safety and lack of public spaces. Which leaves children in this area in a tough situation.

On the contrast, this district have only a small amount of facilities and open spaces for children, especially when we talking about the huge young population here.

Apart from schools, there are several profitable or non-profitable organization for children activities, providing various program. However, due to the limitation, a lot activities can only be held miles away or even cannot be held.

By inspecting existing children facilities, and activities in the area, two blocks have been chosen for the site of the project to connect the two education orgs beside, to form a Kids Zone in the area.

International Blvd is one of major streets in Oakland. The morphology of it originated from 19th century. Because of the topography, it only bends every tens of miles, and one of the them is around Elmhurst district, which is the most important pattern shift of it in miles.

It is interesting that small roads on two sides of International BLVD enjoy kind of misalignment, resulting from the seperative development of the district in history. Numbers of parking lots, vacant lots, and open green spaces at the street corner can be regarded as spontaneous movement to connect different sides of the blvd.

Elmhurst district has a strong urban fabrication. Neibourhoods are divided by fences, cutting them into long land pieces align the Internation Blvd, while lands adjcant to the blvd are larger long pieces, perpendicular to the blvd.

Four bar shaped mass are placed along the texture of the neighbourhood, to avoid messing up the urban texture, while small footprint encourage a better integration with the community, due to the similarity in terms of granularity.

The triangle square is curved out on the podium level to interact with the BLVD geometrically, which would also lead to potential visual and programmatic interaction on the ground floor level.

While the Podium is considering as public, public and public are different. By analyzing people's visit is purpose-driven or just dropping in, those purpose-driven programs were located on the high level, to bring activities onto the podium.

Considering both program layout and relationships withsurroudings, the podium start to shape itself. Different strategies is applied for various conditions.

Responding to the special texture of Elmhurst district, the ground plan and podium is organized in the direction perpendicular to the Internation BLVD, providing a continuous pedestrian experience.

Exhibition spaces is places at the center of ground floor, across the street, pavement between them is redesigned, to provide a continuous experience between two part of the exhibition hall. And the big glass doors are designed to be movable, opening more spatial options for local activities.

The prodium provides a mixing experience of indoor, outdoor and in-between spaces. A rich visual connection and protected access control is yielded by interleaving different functions and partitions carefully.