Historic Form in Focus
Strategic Asset Plan
Group Studio
Professor: Kyle Ezell
2016
The neighborhood of German Village, a designated historic district south of downtown Columbus, Ohio has gone numerous decades without an update to its catalog in the National Register of Historic Places or its own city plan. This studio course sought specifically to fulfill this concern and readdress the neighborhood’s current assets thereby establishing a vision for the neighborhood's future. Lectures and guest speakers supplying pertinent information in the realm of historic preservation were provided to all 15 students in the cohort before proceeding into the field to conduct property surveys of all 1,587 parcels of the neighborhood. These property surveys, which involved photographic and written documentation of each structure's current condition, would serve as the quantitative foundation for our comprehensive strategic asset plan for the village in addition to providing for the National Register of Historic Places.
Beyond the physical environment, extensive outreach via stakeholder interviews and community surveys took place before embarking on development of a 200 page spread that outlined the present day assets of the community and provided insight and recommendations for the future needs of the neighborhood. The module I was assigned to provide recommendations for was Land Use (pg. 124-135). This involved research through documentation of property zoning over three time periods (1930’s, 1960’s, and present) that would be notated along a series of neighborhood maps to visually communicate the current makeup and changes of German Village's zoning. This documentation would become a tool for supplying a comprehensive understanding to the commission and public of the origins of German Village in order to more thoughtfully identify goals and recommendations for the neighborhood to implement as time progresses.
In addition, as a member of the graphic design team, I along with three other peers were charged with devising a visual language for the pamphlet as a whole, along with arrangement of modules and content within each to communicate our narrative.
Multimedia collage: Adobe Illustrator, Photo. March 2018