MouradZeynalovHawkenProjects2021

Mourad Zeynalov Fri, May 21 Hawken Project Blog The first few days of our presentation have been an insight into the achievements and challenges we will face moving forward. While certainly constructing and executing the actual design will be the most challenging part of the project, the modeling, preparations, and approval processes for breaking ground will serve to be the most arduous. Today we spent the day choosing potential locations on the campus and designing birds-eye sketches of the finished project (see below). Receiving approval from the school will require an in-depth plan of what locations we are interested in and what impact it will have on the scenery. We presented our proposed locations to our project mentor Mrs. Zelinski, who commented on her interest in the ideas and suggested meeting with the school's carpenter to discuss how to actually construct them. We also planned to present our proposal to Mr. Lucas, the school's director of facilities. One of the thing...

Mourad Zeynalov Tue, May 25 Hawken Project Blog As our project enters its second week, there are a number of new developments we have been working on. Chiefly has been preparing for the proposal presentation with Mr. Lucas this Thursday. In order to get ready for that, we have been calculating the proposed locations, sizes, and costs of our different designs. We came to the conclusion that we should narrow our scope down to building a large, sandpit Spikeball court seeing that Spikeball is a popular recreation activity at Hawken and students have been asking for a designated location outside of the crowded patio. Shown below are the calculations for the perimeter of the structure as well as the volume of sand necessary to fill down to 3 inches. For a decahedron with an apothem of 9 ft. (chosen because the official serving distance in Spikeball is 6 ft. from the net), we calculated we will need ~58.49 ft. of boundary material and ~65 ft^3 of sand. We decided on a design similar to the o...

    The main inspiration for this project comes from my three years of involvement in Spikeball club. In said endeavor, I got plenty of experience in outdoor space management and the consequences of not having a dedicated outdoor recreational area (namely, many scraped knees). So what better way to combine my own interests and improve the Hawken experience than to bring one such amenity to campus? I hope this project will be just an accessible outlet for stress for students and encouragement for physical activity as Spikeball was for me. We will begin the project by shadowing a carpenter and then most of our time will be spent on campus choosing and surveying the site, building the structures, and testing them for safety.