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communityCenter

Community Building

The main gathering place of our Ecovillage, the Community Building plan features a community kitchen, greenhouse/dining area, root cellar and food storage, laundry, library, classroom, meeting rooms, office, craft room, meditation room, and eleven attached green apartments, all with private storage areas, some with "flex" rooms.

The building will be accessible, and will feature public and private garden areas, a playground, and a gathering grove.
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Basement Level (below)

This is the basement level, with north at the top of the page. On the southwest corner, (left side) is the community kitchen with food storage/rootcellars in the northwest corner. Next to the kitchen in the shape of a pentagon is the greenhouse/dining room, with wheelchair ramps wrapping its perimeter up to a door to the outside at the south point, and farther up to the next floor above.

Light pours in through its glazed south wall and roof over twenty feet above to nourish a few exotic fruit trees arching over the diners. North of the dining room are two classrooms separated by an accordian partition so that a larger meeting room can be created from them, which can be easily darkened for audiovisual presentations. There is an accessible public toilet on this level, and a meditation space east of the classrooms featuring an artistic/stained glass window to add mysterious beauty to the light coming in.

One apartment is east of  the dining room with a barrier-free sunken courtyard space to the south for its garden. The remainder of the rooms on this level are private storage spaces, one for each apartment, and mechanical/utility rooms for the buildings equipment.

basement

First Floor (below)

This is the first floor, with north at the top of the page. On the west end is the primary entrance from the parking lot, with the community office and mailboxes just north of the entry. Also in the northwest corner is the craft room, with light on two sides, a flexible/guest room, and the public barrier-free toilet.

The wide corridor functions socially like a pedestrian “street,”with “porch” sitting spaces at the entrance to each apartment. Nearly two-stories tall, this street has light pouring in from windows at the top, and looks down into the greenhouse/dining room to the south nearly a level down.

There are eleven apartments in the building, all but one accessed from this level, each of which has barrier-free bathrooms and up to two bedrooms, and some also feature “flexible” rooms that have their own bathrooms and doors into each of two adjacent apartments as well as out to the corridor. These flexible rooms make it possible for space in the apartment building to be reapportioned according to the changing needs of the households living there; those who have a flex room they don’t need can rent it to a neighbor or someone else in the community.

In the northeast corner are four walk-up apartments that are not totally barrier-free; instead they have a barrier-free bedroom and bathroom on this level, and stairs up to the rest of their apartment above, as well as down to their basement. You can also see the private garden spaces that each apartment would have the use of outside arranged around the perimeter of the building, with direct access from a door from each living room.

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Second Level (below)

This level only has housing at the east end, where you can see the remainder of the walk-up apartments (to the north) which are entered by stairs from the first level.

South of these walk-up apartments is a large landscaped “green roof” over apartments below, which serves as outdoor living space accessible from the living spaces of the walk-up apartments. The only other things on this level are a storage loft at the west end accessed by stairs in the craft room below, and a mechanical room north of the center and accessed by folding ladder from the “street” below.

The rest of what is shown in this drawing is looking down on the roofs over the apartments and greenhouse, and also looking down into the street and greenhouse a level below.

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Roof (below)

At the northeast end you can see the roof over the walk-up apartments, south of that the flat “green” roof that serves as outdoor living space for them. Just in from the southwest end you can see the glazed roof over the greenhouse. Around that are the roofs of the first floor apartments, with bay windows in the living rooms identifiable at the edges, and dormers over the mechanical room and storage loft on the second level.

roof






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