This is a project that Toretsky did during his senior year of his college years and basically it was almost same thing that we are doing right now. He picked a neighborhood and created a building for the residents in there. Toretsky picked the neighborhood in Brooklyn named Crown Height. He thought it was an interesting spot to working with because himself was come from the Jewish background and Jewish was one big part of the neighborhood. Also, he was curious about how different raise of people overlapping in the same neighborhood. I would said the specific starting point was that he researching about the accident happened in Crown Height. A little black boy was hit by a Jewish driver but the ambulance left the black boy, instead took the Jewish driver to the hospital which caused the black boy’s death. This grabbed Toretsky’s attention and leading he to his research question how might he bring the different group of people who has different culture background together .
In order to make the project, Toretsky did a lot of research, he researched about the history of the neighborhood to found that when and why these different group of people came into the neighborhood. Also, he went for walk and interviewed people in Crown Height, which he found was really the helpful for the research because it helped him to know the sense of space in Crown Height, people’s struggle and their different lifestyle. So he did both qualitative and quantitative research of the neighborhood. He interviewed with different group of people in the neighborhood, Jews, African American and west Indian.. etc. Some people that he interviewed invited to dinner, even to their house because he has the Jewish background, this also became the strategy for getting information and stores from Jews in the neighborhood.
So he designed a building that could hold different kinds of activities in there, diffident group of people could adjust the room any way they want by the design. There were some hight light that I found it was very smart that what he did. First of all, he drew down whatever he saw, experienced in the neighborhood. From looking his drawing I could get a very good sense of what were the project’s process. Also he made the three D video to show what the building would looks like and what kinds of function it has. Yet he even make the model so the residents could see the physical things and help them even more to visualize if the model is a real building that made for them. So Toresky could got a lot of their opinions, making the model really meet their needs.
More, his presentation was also really brilliant, they way he contain drawing, photo and video he made, you could never get board from him. Also he explain the history, research and interviews he did really well so I could tell that he really had studied this neighborhood and I learned a lot of new informations after his presentation.
He definite explains the project very well, even though sometimes he spoke very fast but he would pause and asking question if we knew the vocabulary or concept, to make people are all on the same page.
I would love to see what were people reaction of the building after the resident see that, what kinds of doubts they might have and if they would really use the space often or not?
