The Greenhouse | Final

The Hatchery | Brain storming

My concept for the Hatchery has taken me in a direction that I am SO ok with. In the previous entry, I was conceptualizing about how Greensboro is like a forest and Elm street is a small clearing within that forest that needs a little tender love and care. After sitting at my desk and sketching out different ideas, the word "Greenhouse" popped into my head. Greenhouse. It makes so much sense. It is a place where plants are grown from nothing, into thriving and flourishing organisms. This is my concept. In fact, I've even decided to change the name of the store to "The Greenhouse" instead of "The Hatchery." (The name is even perfect for it location. Think about it. It's in the city of Greensboro. Down the street from the green bean and Natty Greene's. It fits like a little happy puzzle piece.

Above is a perspective of the view of the Greenhouse from the front door. This is just the retail area. I'm wanting to utilize the second floor also, and have it be a loft area to look down into the first floor space. The tall thin structures are going to be made of acrylic, or another durable material. They are placed at random intervals in the center of the space, around the central cashwrap. They are each a different height, no more that 20' and no less than 10'. After each year, students will take big acrylic colorful beads and slide them onto the tall structures, creating a time piece within space. As time goes by, the space gets visually more and more dense with these beads that are placed on the many vertical structures. Also, the surrounding materials are all going to be white and reflective. As time goes on, the color from the light bouncing onto these surfaces from colorful beads will grow and change.

This floor plan is not to scale. I was just playing around with the spacing of the different rooms. I realize now that this is going to have to be completely reworked because the actual space is a LOT more narrow than I have drawn it. My idea for the entire space was that as someone moves back, the glass walls dividing up the rooms would become more and more dense until they get to the performance/ exhibition area, which is completely opaque. I was thinking about using 3form glass, although I'm still searching for material options.
Here are a few different logos that I thought of replacing the Hatchery's egg logo with. Personally, I like the top right one. I think it speaks best to the concept.
This is the cashwrap, for the moment. In the front of it, there is a recess that has cords strung vertically all along it. There are beads strung neatly on it, giving it the same sort of feel as the huge structures around it. It is a minuscule version of them. I'm going to try to have lots of verticalities happening throughout the entire store in different scales. Verticality helps speak to the greenhouse concept.
These panels are going to be hung from the ceiling of the second floor and pointed at the vertical structures. They are abstractions of tree limbs, and also serve as luminaires for the space. They have a strip of LED lights on the top of them, shooting the light up to the ceiling, which would reflect it softly back down to rest of space.

The upper image is of the retail area, below the hangover from the second floor. This wall is where paintings from students are to be hung, as well as merchandise that is to be sold. There are vertical reveals at varying heights all along the wall. There are little latches within these reveals that shelves can be attached to for merchandise. Hooks can also be attached to them for artwork. This allows for great flexibility, so the retail space can morph a little, depending on the stuff they have to sell. Also, there is a track system on the floor and ceiling that vertical panels can be placed into. These panels will prevent the playful colors that are emmited from the large structures from interfering with the displayed artwork. (There are track lights on the ceiling that can point towards art, making it easier to see the piece as it was originally intended by the artist.)

After researching greenhouses a little, I noticed that glass, light, and metal play an enormous role in pretty much every greenhouse. I'm still deciding what I want to do in the space, but so far, I think I'm going in the right direction. The more I design for it, the more excited I get about it.

The Hatchery | Concept Research

A forest is a mass of elements that depend on one another to grow and thrive. A forest, like anything else, builds from the ground up. It starts out small and quite simple. A few trees, a few plants, a few animals. Then, with time and the help of the components within, it builds on top of itself and begins to flourish into a lush, dense mass where everything helps everything else.

Greensboro's artsy reputation is endearing to its citizens, old and new. I imagine a person, coming to Greensboro for the first time, meandering up and down the streets in between the tall buildings of Downtown Greensboro. In my imagination, this image of this visitor is taking more of an abstract form, so bare with me and try to visualize this. I see them wandering through a forest--a thriving, flourishing forest where everything is interesting, vibrant, and intriguing. The light feathers in gently through the trees as they pick their path, careful to avoid stampedes of cheetahs and monkeys (cars and bikes..heehee). As they walk into different coves (the stores), they are inspired and mesmerized by what they see. (Are you visualizing this? Bare with me, its not over.) The person sees a clearing in the forest ahead. Even though its brighter because there are less trees, it somehow seems darker. As they linger closer, they start to zero in on slight changes in the environment around them. The vibrancy of the forest dims to a dull hue. The trees surrounding the clearing look a little charred, Finally, they reach the threshhold of this strange clearing and realize that there had been a fire here--not a terrible one, but one that destroyed what that immediate area needed to survive. The person sees tiny signs of life, like baby grass growing back on the ground, and moss covering the charred trees, signifying that this poor little clearing it isn't past the point of no return. Its just a patient, desolate plane in the middle of this thriving forest, waiting for new inhabitants to help it become useful and beautiful once again.

Ok, abstraction over. Here's the translation. This person, intrigued by all of what Greensboro has to offer, stumbles upon South Elm street and notices that there isn't much happening on a small part of it. Most of the stores are vacant, and the majority of the ones that aren't, look like they soon will be. Compared to the rest of Downtown Greensboro, that area is a little dead and needs a lot of work. In order to make it thrive like the rest of it, though, it needs inhabitants that are willing to put forth the correct amount of resources that it needs to re-flourish.

That being said, I haven't though as much about the actual design of the interior of the Hatchery, which, we all know, resides in the midst of this poor, desolate, charred area of downtown Greensboro. I know for a fact that I want lots of vertical elements within it, symbolizing the vertical element within any forest that one decides to wander through. There will be a cutout in the middle of the second floor, allowing these vertical elements to shoot up very high, creating that feeling of wonderful vertigo for the people walking around the retail space. So I won't be in the risk of my space looking too much like an actual forest, I am going to adopt inorganic manmade materials. Galvanized steel? Cement? Acrylic? Lacquered walls? I'm still debating, but I know that materiality and color are going to be quite different from an actual forest. As a person walks through the space, I want light somehow to be filtered in from different places above, giving it that walking-through-a-forest feel. The bottom floor would be darker (making that perfect for hanging artwork and aiming lights at it to highlight them) and the second floor to be lighter because it is up in the "canopy" of the forest. These are my thoughts so far--nothing too concrete, but I think I'm going in the right direction...at least I hope I am.

The Hatchery | Concept Research

The above three images were all from http://www.insider-worldwide.com/interior_design_london_tours/

The three images above remind me of the renaissance festival that I visit every fall in Huntersville. The top image reminds me of a castle. The two bottom images look organic, woodsy, and handcrafted. I think this might be a good concept for the Hatchery because the “Renaissance” times were filled with artisans, all collaborating and working together to create new works of art, which is what the hatchery is all about. We are creating this space to expose the very talented artisans within the walls of UNCG to the rest of the Greensboro community.

Material-wise, I want the walls to be gray brick, with predetermined shapes at regular intervals cut out in it and lights (light the picture above) will be placed within them. This might be just one band on the wall near the ceiling, and maybe angled up at the ceiling. I don’t want that detail to compete with the artwork being sold within the retail space. The grey brick walls loosely symbolize castle walls and the materiality within these walls will be a woodsy, organic feel. I don’t want this to be too renaissance-themed, but I do want it to have the same feel with materiality and shapes used within the space.

The Hatchery | Bubble Diagrams