Crossroads Community Center

The design for a food market and community space in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, the Crossroads Community Center serves as an epicenter, or crossroads, meant to bridge a longstanding divide between the neighborhoods. At the center of the site is a large courtyard space open to the public, hosting amenities such as access to the fresh food market, a community garden, educational classrooms, and a second floor event space and green roof. The site also hosts the new headquarters of the Edible Schoolyard organization in partnership with the Forsyth Satellite Academy to provide educational and nutritional resources to students and a community that has long been void of them.

August-December 2023

Professor Gregory Merryweather

Partner: Gabby Chavez-Courtney

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Crossroads Community Center began diagrammatically following a site analysis, in which the socioeconomic divide of the area was a key focus of the project. Areas investigated were access to transportation, demographics, and economic factors.

With a key idea in place, massing models were made to begin to visualize how this theme would manifest itself into the overall building design and programming. The center model became the chosen design for its creation of a central courtyard space. This was developed further to become the massing seen on the right.

Through the massing, the program was approached as separate and less integrated parts of a whole, adding a passageway from on end of the park to the other. This resulted in a sort of wrapping effect, where the program began to wrap around one another and the site, isolating the center as public. This idea was pushed forward to being incorporating programmatic elements and organization.

Working through different iterations of this site plan, the one challenge that became apparent was the crossroad began to limit the approach towards the building circulation and its spatial organization. Carrying a similar idea forward, however, the site was rearranged to open the door for programming, while remaining true to the initial goal of connecting the surrounding communities. This new design was continually developed for the remainder of the semester.

As part of the Pratt Institute Spring 2024 curriculum, this project was turned into an accompanying Construction Documents set in Revit, which can be viewed here.

This project, i.e. all research, process, and final work, was compiled and archived for NAAB Accreditation. To view the PDF Portfolio, click here.