Design / Build in Florida’s Big Bend
University of Florida
“Together, designing and building yield insights about a place, while place itself illuminates the process of making and its multivalent outcomes.”
— Charlie Hailey
For the past couple of decades, design/build projects at the University of Florida have engaged students in reflective building along Florida’s Big Bend coastal region. Each project explores ‘reflecting’ as an inherent part of thinking and making as it also seeks to understand each place’s ‘reflections’ of urgent questions, including social equity, climate change, and biodiversity. Projects range from outdoor classrooms to porches, from community performance spaces to places for sitting and resting. Where water and land meet, they look to confluences of human activity with natural systems: practices of boat building and sponging, arts of quilt-making and chess-playing, landscapes of horseshoe crabs and hurricanes, and now working landscapes of aquaculture amid rising seas. Each successive studio returns to these places, continues community dialogues, witnesses change, and watches cedar timbers weather. Projects shown here: Two Porches is a demonstration project that serves as a gathering place for the historically Black community of North Port St. Joe and fosters dialogues about affordable housing programs in particular and community resilience in general; in White Springs, Carver Pavilion hosts musical performances, quilt pageants, and annual Emancipation Day celebrations, while also serving as a memorial to the teachers at the segregation-era school on the adjacent site; projects in Cedar Key include Earth and Sky, which respond to the estuary’s subtle changes; Muir’s Rest commemorates the last steps of naturalist John Muir’s thousand-mile walk to the Gulf; and Drift offers space for watching outdoor films, carving pumpkins, and painting buoys behind the Chamber of Commerce. Cedar Key’s projects also afforded international collaborations with architects Sami Rintala and Philip Tidwell.
