The Pinewoods Library and Learning Center dedicates itself to providing social and educational resources to its community, and we aim to help them enhance their outdoor spaces through landscape and furniture design. Through maintainable design and community engagement, we are striving to create interactive and educational spaces for everyone.

The Pinewoods Library provides bilingual services and programs to the mobile home community of Pinewood Estates. This community embodies a strong Latin American culture, housing around 360 families, of which about 95% are Hispanic. Many community members have expressed a lack of access to recreational and educational services for adults and children.

Based off of the community analysis data, this project aims on providing design elements in the outdoor spaces of the Pinewoods Library that create a safe and unified sense of place, inclusive to the educational and recreational needs of a primarily Hispanic and immigrant community.

Allowing the kids to give input to the site was a great focus during the overall design process. With this input we will be able to find the best case use for the site, while also giving the kids a sense of ownership and involvement over the space they helped to create. Images of the site were taken and turned into coloring sheets to help children give input for the site in an easier way.

Rainwater collection, shared reading spaces, an edible garden, and sun tolerant and hardy plantings were some of the design programming objectives that came out of the community engagement session. We hope the kids can feel empowered through literacy and activity, and therefore the masterplan incorporates programming elements that encourage and inspire the kids, such as a mural wall, exercise equipment, educational signage, and a little free library. 

We provided the community with a variety of easy volunteer projects for simple design implementation such as being able to paint their own stepping stones, create their own fabric shade structure, build their own pallet fort, as well as DIY their own little free library. We hope the kids can feel empowered by creating safe, educational, and interactive spaces for everyone.