Just an Ordinary Wooden Box

Olympic village—quite a fascinating name for a concept that often falls in ruins shortly after the Olympic games occur. It’s definitely an honor to host the games, but is it worth it? As with honor comes expense. The money is gone forever, but the pride and commemoration does not last forever. Unfortunately, many cities fear the risk of hosting the olympics which is quite a shame as I love watching them. Speaking of global sports events, the Women’s World Cup(soccer) is occurring right now. I think the event deserves more recognition and awareness and before you say I’m going off track, Vancouver is in fact one of the host cities. That’s how I know about it anyway.. heh.

The Winter Olympics was hosted in 2010 in Vancouver so it’s still too early to foresee the future of Vancouver’s Olympic Village. It is currently in beautiful shape and hopefully it stays that way. Sadly, that might not be the case. Two architectural planners of the Olympic Village gave us a tour, and the park I must say definitely has amazing design and infrastructure. From innovate and creative designs like spinnable chairs and 8-bit playgrounds to practical and efficient designs like the stormwater management system, Olympic Village  shows promise as a prominent user-space. Our tour guides did mention, however the gradual decay of maintenance in the park. This seems to be a frequent trend in Vancouver actually. There’s a lot of fascinating spaces that are beautifully designed, but there is a lack of maintenance to maintain the beauty.

One more thing about the Olympic Village. There is a resting area with huge sparrow statues that we spent most of our time reflecting and writing at. One notable observation that I had is during the noon, as the sun shined with its greatest prominence. There are two sides to the resting area, one in direct contact with sunlight and one that is shaded from the sunlight. Curiously, everybody at the resting area sat in the area directly below the sunlight and not in the shade. Perhaps Vancouver doesn’t get much sunlight, but there was plenty of sunlight during the week that we went.

After that, we headed to MakerLabs, an innovative workspace company that transitioned from concept to reality not too long ago. Props to Derek(hopefully I spelled your name right) for quitting his job to pursue his dream of MakerLabs. If you’re reading this, I wish you luck in the future! Alright so on to what we came here for. We too, needed to make our concept into a reality—Project Related to Augmented Simulation(RPAS). You can think Aaron, one of our youth leaders for the brilliant name, I’m still not too sure what it actually means but Aaron probably doesn’t know either. To put it simply, it’s designed to be a detachable wooden box used for Campaign presentation that doubles as a material holder. There were two teams, one to design the box and one to design the models. I worked on the box, and I must admit; it was one of the most painful, yet gratifying experiences that I ever had. We spent hours finding the right wood, maneuvering the laser cutter, screwing the hinges, and hacksawing the screws(long story) but in the end, it was all worth it. The model team created a bunch of cool wooden models, including gifts to funders and donors of the trip. If any of you are reading this, hopefully you enjoy the gifts and thanks for making our trip possible!

-David Yi