3rd Year | Fall 2024 | IARC 375 | Professor Rana Abudayyeh | 201 Randolph St. Knoxville, TN | University of Tennessee, Knoxville
In collaboration with Amazon Air, this project aims to exemplify building as restitution and give back to the displaced communities that were victims of the city of Knoxville's urban renewal projects by providing public access to a rooftop community garden, marketplace, and sixth floor cafeteria for the surrounding Knoxville community and Amazon Air employees. This building is dedicated to Nikki Giovanni, an African American poet from Knoxville who wrote a poem about growing up in Knoxville's vibrant minority community before the urban renewal projects were enacted. The Nikki Giovanni Community Garden Center would also accommodate office, package prep, storage, and drone maintenance facilities for Amazon Air.
Concept Design
The Nikki Giovanni Community Garden Center’s design stems from previous phases of analyzing formations within the Luray Caverns landscape.
Two components from this study were analyzed further through 3D modeling and manipulated to create interior spaces within these melting modulars.
Site Analysis
Through investigating the history of the project’s surrounding site and major neighborhoods in Knoxville, the impacts of gentrification, urban renewal, and displacement onto the city’s minority communities are still present to this day. This discovery provided the foundation for the Nikki Giovanni Community Garden Center advocating for these communities to rise against the pressures gentrification and reestablish a strong, tight-knit community.
Schematic Design
Our site is a historic fireproof building that is currently repurposed as a storage facility and is in close proximity to Knoxville's downtown and Old City area. With Amazon Air also existing in the Nikki Giovanni Community Garden Center, accommodations were made that allow Amazon's MK27 drones to freely deliver packages to customers from the rooftop kiosk station. Community members can observe the Amazon employees interacting with the drones flying to and from the kiosk station as part of the rooftop community garden and marketplace.
Showcased below are three primary floor plans of the Nikki Giovanni Community Garden Center as well as a section perspective displaying each individual level of this building.
These renderings highlight special moments within certain levels of the building showcasing the architectural elements formed by the 3D analysis model of Luray Caverns and how the community and Amazon Air employees would interact with the space.
This diagram explains the proposed material strategy of the third level Amazon Air office space in the Nikki Giovanni Community Garden Center. While most of these materials are specific to this level, the same ideas of restoring and preserving the historical and cultural integrity of displaced communities are incorporated in the selection of the exterior and interior materials throughout the building.
