Marina Park Thesis

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Marina Park Thesis

Type

Commercial › Retail
Hospitality + Sport › Hotel
Cultural ›
Landscape + Planning › Public Park
Transport + Infrastructure › Marina and Ports

In 1995 I chose Marina Park as the site for my senior thesis
while attending the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center. All the street life and downtown vibrance of
Alexandria, Virginia becomes an exclamation point where King Street meets the
Potomac River, but my interest wasn't captured there. If you walk 4 blocks south along the river,
the land gives way again to water and a long forgotten marina. A sea of orderly piles that once held a pier is
bounded on the north by row houses, on the east by a community park and the
south by what was once an old Ford manufacturing plant designed by Albert Kahn
but the plant now lives as an open green space.
Not many visit the park, not even on the most beautiful of weekend days.

I believe life can easily be brought back to the area even
though the jewel of Alexandria is only a few blocks away. The place already has a history of harboring
boats albeit large ones that shipped Ford automobile parts, but the idea is
there to draw from. I created a place
for smaller boats to stay for an hour, a day or a week. A place where their captains could take
refuge on solid soil for a bit, stock up on food and supplies or just to get a
meal prepared by someone else, which is where the idea of a 3 story structure
came in. The 1st floor would
be open to retail, perhaps a small restaurant, a fishing store, a wine shop and
the like. The 2nd and 3rd
floors would house Marina Park Inn where the captains, their sailors and even
land lovers could get away for awhile.
But this creative community itself needed more.

I felt an open market would not only give the nearby
neighborhoods a place to buy local, but also a place to sell local on a much
smaller scale than that of King Street.
Marina Park Market would be the secret of those who lived there, but
there needed to be an easier way to get to the market from the community park
than to walk across South Union Street...something to draw you in. The pier was in the first vignette I sketched,
and it made it to the final presentation.
It is the community's landmark, the boat captains' watermark and a
physical link between all the functions Marina Park has to offer.

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Marina Park Thesis

Marina Park Thesis

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