It is hard to understand the complexity of a project unless you are invested in the process and its outcome. This became very apparent when we started working on the club in September. The previous Boys and Girls Club presented a clear case study and gave us a jumping off point to start our research.

First off we wanted to understand the successes and failures of the previous club and locate where the breakdown in organization occurred. The last thing we wanted to do was make the same mistakes as the previous team by not learning from their work. The breakdown seemed to come in the organization of the club’s operator and programs, which was the result of a tight construction schedule and many other issues that were out of the students control. We saw that as a critical element of the clubs success that needed to be addressed before design work could start on the new facility.

We began with researching the advantage of having a national affiliate versus an independently run club. We visited several clubs run by the National Boys and Girls Clubs of America and spoke with directors of both affiliated and independently operated clubs. We concluded that an affiliation offered numerous advantages and presented these findings to the city council through case studies and a comparison of the two situations. From this research the city decided to affiliate with The National Boys and Girls Clubs of America; from there a partnership was quickly formed with the Boys and Girls Clubs of West Alabama.

It was almost November before we began designing the clubs new facility. At the beginning the project had a few prerequisites, one was to utilize a lamella roof system, which was being employed by another Rural Studio team, and the second was that we locate the club on city owned property. The second constituent arose from the problems of the previous team; by placing our building on city owned property we would annul the ownership problems by placing the ownership in the cities hands. We saw both issues as constraints rather than burdens.