Project Background
My high school was asked to design a park based on Historic Richmond Town. The goal of this park was to provide fun activities for young children but also teach them about the history of Staten Island. My CAD teacher selected me and a few other students who had promising CAD skills to team up and work on this.
We started by brainstorming ideas of park modules and what we thought would be fun for the kids. One of the things we did was research different parks and figure out how to incorporate their elements into ours. We came up with many ideas for park modules and then tried to connect elements of Staten Island's history to them. Our modules dated back to before the 1400s and went all the way up to current times. We themed these modules after the Lenape Dome Dwellings, the Caravels of Giovanni da Verrazano, the Subway, the Verrazano Bridge, the Staten Island Ferry, Ralph's Ices, and the Staten Island Wheel which is currently in development.
After finalizing our ideas we began modeling them using AutoCAD and Tinkercad. We also used AutoCAD to plan how we wanted to layout these modules and it was very helpful during the design phase.
Besides designing this park we also had to present it to a board at the Borough Hall of Staten Island. There were representatives from Historic Richmond Town as well as the Borough President and his staff. We decided to create a 3D model of our park to showcase our designs. Our school had a lot of 3D printers and a plotter so we created an aerial map of the area and then placed the modules. This allowed us to give a good demonstration of our plan for the park and made it much more realistic.
Below are several pictures of modules and layouts. Attached is a google drive link to the presentation we gave to Borough Hall. This gives a more in-depth look at our modules and what historical elements we based them on. Please click here to view the presentation.
