This was a student group project by Daniel Mathur and Michael McCoskey for John McMorrough's ARCH 842 course, Winter 2008. At the highest, pastoral is the notion that nature's presence is a romantic ablution, active by its mere adjacency. At its lowest, pastoral is a Thomas Kinkade painting. Either way, Gahanna as it exists in present form is not pastoral. Given a site of 14 acres with the requirement of at least 135 units, the pastoral challenge was to maximize the landscape and minimize the built footprint. Hence there are just six buildings with parking underneath. The mass of the buildings is a square organized by a tartan grid of manageable dimensions (20 feet). From this, portions are chopped away in order to create site specific relations to the landscape. Likewise, exterior treatments of the buildings break down into two categories depending on whether the building is in field or forest. The field treatment is meant to reference agrarian and industrial mat metals, while the forest treatment is meant to minimize the buildings presence. The tartan grid also determines the structural system and unit configuration. The former is a steel moment frame placed in and on a concrete parking structure. The latter has two types of units, of which one is linear and the other is L-shaped. Both may be either single or double-height spaces. In brief, the pastoral yields succinct architecture for simple living. - Daniel Mathur and Michael McCoskey This work is a part of the online collections of the Knowlton School of Architecture Student Archives, The Ohio State University. It is part of an effort to make accessible student work ranging from the first student that graduated from the program in 1903 to the present. The effort to preserve and digitize drawings in the Student Archives was sponsored in part by the Graham Foundation.
