Project type: Adaptive re-use, mixed-use
Location: Charlotte, North Carolina
Critic: Kelly Carlson-Reddig
In collaboration with Eric Jackson
Camp North End is an assembly of buildings surrounded by a loop, leading to spaces without imposing itself onthem. The buildings are surrounded like paths on a circuit board, they are only experienced upon a decision to break the loop. A neglected portion of this circuit can provide a return to beginning and end. A piece of it that sits dangling on the edge like an icicle waiting to drop, is nowrecognized and interrogated. A historic piece of building sits adjacent to key portions of Camp North End. The boiler yard, raceway, and future residencies and parking are opportunities for inclusion ofthe entire site, they cannot be left alone.They must be reached from this piece.
The tops of this piece get removed, clearing the way for something. Leaving only a grid of existing trusses that hang exposed within a bounding box, a bounding box that will be imposed upon. The existing site and its elements choose where the grid is disrupted, bullying its way to the interior like a glacier carving its way through land. From this point on the bounding box reshapes itself, this time accommodating for the impositions of the existing circuit. New boxes insert themselves into these disruptions, expressing its imposition by rebuilding itself with new structure and materiality.
Now the circuit can grow. It can breathe. It extends from both what is new and what was already there. These pathways act as the veins, but instead of exchanging blood they exchange people.
