Our largest design challenge is to fit the necessary structures onto the site we have chosen and that has been approved for the village, while making a convivial and efficient matrix for our lives together and on the land.
A large number of factors go into village site planning. For one, we need to know how many of which types of structures we are going to build. This in turn depends on members’ needs, on the projected needs of our preferred overall demographic make-up, and on financial feasibilities of different possible mixes of members and their likely housing needs. This what we are calling “Unit Mix” decisions. After extensive discussion, a provisional Unit Mix was recommended to General Circle by Planning & Development and approved in the early Fall of 2021. You can access the summary here.
The next and key task is to develop a village site layout that works from multiple perspectives: architecturally (design and layout of individual buildings); on the scale of the village (massing of buildings as a whole, sight lines, clustering… livability and delightfulness in general), as well as drainage, fitting contour, allowance for utilities, traffic, etc. This will be a key task for our site designer and engineer, Bobby Tucker of Bodhi Land and Design – and that work that is underway as we speak.
Longer-time members will recall that we have developed several previous and tentative site plans, most notably from a summit in Asheville in 2019 between Jonathan Lucas (architect), Greg Ramsey of Village Habitat Design, and Bobby Tucker, where we began the process of integrating their three perspectives, along with Katy and Anthony organizing and facilitating the event from the community’s side. All of this was exciting (the banner photo is from the middle of it) and helpful in beginning to align perspectives and “think big”, but as with the architectural work, it was mostly paused soon thereafter due to uncertainty about funding and the potential impact of alternative funding possibilities on site planning.
Out of Asheville we developed a possible village layout, using different blocks for the different residence structures working on a large printout of the village site, which was displayed for some time at community meetings for members to see. There were also photos of it on a previous version of this page. Since we are now resuming work on site planning, we have removed this old material, in preparation for the new, soon to come. Many elements of the older plans have dated or changed, for a variety of reasons including extensive architectural revisions, more detailed planning for water, electrical, and other service, and building that we have already done in the farm area on the land. We’re delighted that we have made so much progress already, and have come to the point that a professional engineer is developing the kinds of plans we need to actually build the village, but it does mean that we don’t yet have a fully up-to-date plan to display yet. Come back soon though! We’ll post drawings and other materials as soon as they become available.
