Drexel C.O.R.E Project Overview

For our Freshman Design Project, we are creating a theoretical living-learning community for graduate students and PhD's. We are calling the community Drexel C.O.R.E, which stands for Collective Opportunities for Research and Education. The community will feature three distinct areas for research and discovery: Engineering, Medical, and Arts. Additionally, the community will have a plaza that  contains buildings for recreation and leisure as well as areas for living. These four sections of the community will be connected by a bridge that meets in the center of the city. The bridge will therefore literally unite the different concentration areas and symbolically encourage the spread of ideas. In terms of deliverables, we will be designing a scale model of the bridge out of Erector sets. The bridge will then span a scale model of the city.

We have researched the philosophies behind communities that are centered around a common ideal and have implemented these ideas into our own design. The basis for our community is the belief that learning should be inspired and should span multiple concentration areas. Consequently, our entire design is based upon the idea that by creating a community that is conducive to research, inhabitants will be motivated to make advancements in their fields. The layout of the city is such that inhabitants can focus on their own concentration areas and also be inspired by the research of those in other concentration areas. By designing the city in this way, we will create a positive environment where knowledge is spread and discoveries are made.

In order to complete the project, we have decided upon hard and soft constraints for our bridge and city design. We are going to make accurate scale models of the bridge and city that are also aesthetically pleasing. Additionally the bridge will have to be able to hold a certain amount of weight. In order to make sure that our bridge is a realistic model, we are researching different bridge types and constructing our bridge accordingly. We will be presenting our model at the end of the term and will also be explaining the theory behind our city.