We’re racing around town, cleaning up the site, welding a handrail, moving dirt, and otherwise scrambling to finish the farmers market building in time for our grand opening ceremony on Saturday! In case you haven’t seen the details, they can be found here. We’re excited to have everyone come out on Saturday to inhabit the farmers market pavilion for the first time – we’ll have an architectural photographer and documentary crew in town, as well as (of course) our students, the mayor, town councilmen, vendors,

Just a few quick snapshots to show how we framed and sided each of the vendor’s countertops. Vendors will need access from behind the counter into the main space, so we have left the side of the bay open, with a low shelf (similar to a check-in counter at the airport, where you have your luggage weighed). We may add a flip-up countertop piece to that open space, depending on feedback from the vendors, though this would likely not happen until after the opening on

Drumroll, please… On behalf of Studio H and our Bertie Early College students, we are excited to invite one and all to attend the grand opening of the Windsor Super Market pavilion on Saturday, October 1st at 10am. The structure is the culmination of a year’s worth of work, and the vision of both Project H and more importantly, our junior-year students who designed and helped to build the pavilion. It is modern, uses local materials, and is an inviting communal space that will house

Above is a photo of our site when we first decided to build the farmers market. An unsightly fence cut through the property. Below is a photo of the site today, with the near-complete farmers market structure standing tall, and the fence taken down, opening up a huge yard space that bleeds right out to the street. We hope that the removal of the fence will mean for a more inviting site, and complement the openness of the building’s front facade. The building is basically

It’s been decided: our Grand Opening Ceremony for the Windsor Super Market structure will be Saturday, October 1st, at 10am (a normal market day from 9-1pm). It’s incredibly exciting, and yet, we still have so much to do. With less than three weeks to go, we still have the pedestrian ramp along the front side of the structure to build, the electrical to install (for lights and vendor stall power), the gutter system, the vendor countertops, and a walkthrough with the town for our Certificate

Last week, we finished all the cross-bracing on the market structure, and added a bit more for extra measure, as Hurricane Irene was on her way. We left town, as did most other Windsor residents, and crossed our fingers. We knew full well that the structure itself was well-engineered to withstand hurricane-force winds, but if a tree were to fall on it, a telephone pole, there were plenty of what-if scenarios that could do damage to the structure we had put so much time and

Just in the past 10 months, Bertie County has seen a town-destroying flood (water above the rooftops in downtown Windsor), an F4 tornado that killed 14, and a 5.8 earthquake just a few days ago. Also headed our way this weekend is Hurricane Irene, which they’re predicting to hit the Eastern seaboard just 100 miles east of us, with winds upwards of 70 miles per hour headed to Bertie County. We can’t seem to catch a break from all the dirty weather, and with our

Today, with a bit of excavator maneuvering and a lot of nails, we finished putting all the siding up on the building. The front side of the structure was particularly tough to access, as we have already poured foundation footers for the ramp out front, plus the site is a bit sloped, so getting our excavator platform up close enough to the building was tricky. Unlike the back side of the building, where the siding breaks at every bay to denote each individual market stall,

This morning, we poured 5 yards of concrete for our front access ramp. Along the front of the building, access will follow the slope of the site at a 1:24 incline (which means by ADA, it is not required to have a handrail). The site will be graded right up to the ramp, so that the ramp is set into the ground and follow the topography. This morning, we poured the footers for the sonotubes and wall along the far edge. On top of these