Summer 2026
University of Virginia | Summer Design Institute
Situated at the convergence point of the Rivanna River and Moores Creek, with an industrial history dating back to the late 18th century, Woolen Mills is a rich site for the study of found conditions. Woolen Mills, with it's proximity to Charlottesville's historic downtown, a rail-line, and the two prominent waterways produced wool, grist, cotton and other products that supported the growth of Charlottesville as early as 1795. Since then, the site witnessed a sequence of destruction, rebuilding, and transformations. Today, the site hosts a cafe, a restaurant, and co-working spaces for the community.
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After being gifted a transect within Woolen Mills (see the dashed boundary to the left), the challenge was to define and display the site's qualities through annotation and hand-drawing. The site plan (see drawing below) aims to located key physical features along the transect: trees, railroad crossings, retaining features, etc. However, in defining the site according to it's physical features only, there's a narrative that's still missing.
What the previous plan above fails to relay is a sense of compression and release, a quality that this particular transect expresses at various scales across its bounds. Traversing the natural and built landscape of this transect, it's difficult to ignore the material qualities of what is suspended overhead and how they are contributing to the unique experience in that particular space.
Between the Railroad and Parking Lot: A Moment of Release
Amongst the Trees: Compression
Looking Down at Moores Creek
A reworking of the site plan (below) illustrates the level of compression an individual feels, relative to their location on site, through a scalar manipulation of horizontal lines. The plan recognizes this "unseen" quality through its selective capture of suspended tree canopy and built structures along the transect in relation to a 5'-0" human being, navigating this zone. The long section (below the plan) displays the individual tree canopies and railroad structure as they work with the ground plane's surface to create moments of immense compression and profound release on the site.
As the relationship between the ground plane and tree canopy became increasingly important in understanding the site and its capacity to host a design intervention of any sort, the physical model (displayed below) became a tool to illuminate their independent material qualities and highlight the void captured between them. In a future investigation of this site, this void or emptiness, could be an incredible starting point for a design intervention, transforming a notational understanding of site and fieldwork, and carrying it forward into design development.
Material Representations: Tree Canopy as Translucent & Diffuse, Ground as Compact & Solid
