2003

The 8th Designers 3D CAD Challenge
 The 2003 Design Project :


PlaySpace Structures
for the
Ronald McDonald House Boston
Location :
Boston, Massachusetts

Ronald McDonald House Boston  --  http://www.ronaldmcdonaldhouseboston.com
The Ronald McDonald House is a place where the families of children with cancer can live while their child/sibling undergoes treatment at nearby hospitals.
Click here for more background information about the Ronald Mcdonald House Boston

"A Home-Away-From-Home"
The idea behind Ronald McDonald House is simple: provide a “home-away-from-home” for families of seriously ill children who are receiving treatment at nearby hospitals.

Some children need to travel great distances to get the medical attention they need. In-hospital treatment may last one day, one year, or even longer. For the families of these children, accommodations can be hard to come by; options are often limited to costly hotels or unforgiving hospital chairs and benches.

The Ronald McDonald House provides a comfortable, supportive alternative for these families. It serves as a temporary residence near the medical facility where family members can sleep, eat, relax and find support from other families in similar situations. In return, families are asked to make a donation ranging from $5 to $20 per day; if that isn’t possible, their stay is free.


The Design Project
Photographs of Site CADD Drawings of Site Resource Web Sites
Site Plan of Site 3D Model of Site Inspiration Sample Images

Project Background :

The Ronald McDonald House Boston is currently running a fundraiser campaign for a new playground.  The existing playground equipment badly needs replacing, and the entire playground area needs a re-design to make it more usable.  The house is a temporary residence for the families of children cancer patients who are being treated at nearby Dana Farber and Children's Hospitals.  There are rooms for 27 families at the site.  The playground should have areas that could accomodate both the infirm children as well as their siblings.  A barbecue patio currently adjoins the playarea and a deck just outside the large kitchen/breakfast area is also immediatly adjacent - though raised up 3' without either ramp or lift.  Also adjacent is another under-utilized space currently used for outside storage next to the main house.  Surrounding the play area is a curved ramp that leads to the six appartments below the parking lot.  At present, the playspace is approximately 35'x40'.

Project Description :

New playstructures, encompacing slides, tubes, climbing structures, bridges, swings, and creatively inspirational fun structural elements.

Level the play area - or make several levels.

The curved ramp down to the lower apartments could possibly be relocated/redesigned to enable the playspace to work better.

Find better use for current outside storage space next to main building.

Explore ways to integrate deck, patio, playspace better.

Try to accomodate several areas of playspace - for younger children, for infirm children, for older more active children.


     Ronald McDonald House Charities  --  http://www.rmhc.com 

The 2003 Designers 3D CAD Challenge continues its role as a public service, while at the same time allowing us all to get a view of how the various different CADD programs work in a real design context, by taking on the added challenge of a "traditional charrette" - a pro-bono public service to solve a community problem. For over 200 years there have been dozens of architectural charrettes each year where architects and other designers come together for a marathon design session to solve an architectural problem for the public good. This year, instead of yellow trace flying about the room and flipchart presentations, we take advantage of the technology of architectural CADD and the Designers 3D CAD Challenge to allow the designers to do their designs faster and more comprehensively and to allow us all to watch the charrette in a better way with large screen projection of their digital work underway.

As of September 29, 2003, we have narrowed down the possible projects to the design of a PlaySpace at the Ronald McDonald House in Boston (a place where the families of children patients at the hospitals can live while their child/sibling undergoes treatment).

Click here to see the other projects on this that were proposed and will now consider as possible projects in 2004