Urban rehabilitation 2010

Abstract

In order to maintain a high quality of life for the residents of growing rural communities a more efficient, sustainable, and pragmatic architectural solution must be devised. The current mentality concerning rural development and lifestyle must be reshaped in order to adapt to an increasingly environmentally conscience world. Within the built environment is the opportunity to provide direction for this positive change. Through extensive research and study, I intend to create an architectural solution that begins to shape its inhabitant's mentality, behavior and lifestyle by utilizing, teaching, and promoting the importance of nature and its cycles. Thus minimizing environmental impacts and conserving energy while improving the health, happiness, and quality of life of the building's occupants. Considering most of a persons life is spent immersed in architecture, the built environment determines a large portion of its inhabitants impact on the environment. This can be significantly minimized if the buildings, required as a necessity in peoples lives, have less impact on the environment. The future project's location should minimize its residents and visitors need for private vehicular transportation by providing an appealing environment for daily economic, recreational and social activities to take place simultaneously. It is my goal to continuously unite nature and man within the building and its surroundings forming awareness and appreciation for the natural world and its cycles by providing gardens through which residents can each begin to personally establish a relationship with nature. Most importantly, the project should be immersed as close to a natural recreational and wildlife area as possible. Through the resident's interaction with gardening environments, the surrounding natural landscape, and the building's use of natural energies and systems, an intimate relationship and sense of dependency on nature will become ingrained in the people living in and experiencing the building. Community and public spaces will be integrated within the development in order to encourage social and economical relationships while further immersing the architecture into the existing community. Ultimately this solution would encourage and promote positive interaction and relationships between the residents, the Bozeman community, and nature. The final result would be an architectural solution that provides a more energy and spatially efficient alternative to lateral development while embracing, improving, and interacting with the local environment, the central core of the city, and the existing community.