Gisselt Gomez, Sean McGadden, Jacob Moscowitz, Louis Suarez, and Alex Wang

The Hoop House was the second stage of the Fall '17 semester, following the hanginging garden project preceding the Grow Center project. The hoop house was thinking at the scale of a greenhouse, which needed to provide life support for plants over the harsh Pittsburgh winter. Our group consisted of six members of diverse backgrounds, from design to construction. The Hoop House was made of steel conduit and greenhouse heat shrink, and was installed at Phipps Conservatory.

My role in the project was to analyze the site conditions like the standard sun path, temperature, and humidity using Climate Consultant, as well as making a drone-scanned-style model of the site (I don't have a drone so I cheated a bit and used Google Earth). Relating to the work with sunpath, I made a Grasshopper script that displays the sun path and models surfaces based off those sun angles. As the project developed, I made construction axos and really pushed for expression through joinery, which I see as my largest contribution to the project. I assisted Sean in making full-scale working joinery mock-ups.

Interestingly enough, for a project with so many moving parts and small openings, it was one of the few that didn't fall apart or tear open, and of those that remained intact it also kept about half of the plants alive.