Week 7

I grew up in Margaretville, a town of only six hundred and fifty people, inside the Catskill Mountain Park. Even though my family has since moved away we still receive the local newspaper The Catskill Mountain News. The headline of the most recent issue was "Margaretville goes to Manhattan" and of course this peaked my interest. It turns out that Parson's, The New School for Design, had rebuilt the town pavilion, and in a town of only six hundred and fifty people, that is a pretty big deal.

Margaretville is built on an ecologically sensitive floodplain of the Delaware River. For years the town has been plagued by terrible floods, recently they have gotten more severe and have been causing more damage. The town pavilion, which has been there for fifty years, has also been damaged in the floods. Since 1998 Parson's Design Workshop has done a non-profit project, and this year rebuilding the Margaretville Pavilion was their project. The project, the workshops largest, and most ambitious to date, was completed by eleven students in only three months. An exhibition featuring the project was held in the Shelia C. Johnson Design Center.

I thought as an exhibition as a whole was really well done. The first thing you see when you enter the gallery is a wall sized photograph of the completed pavilion. On another wall of the gallery there was a week-by-week timeline of what was accomplished throughout the project starting with demolition of the old pavilion in June. In the center of the gallery there was a scale model of the pavilion, complete even with miniature picnic tables. My favorite part of the gallery however was on the last wall there was a video compilation of the day-by-day progress that was completed. This was so touching for me because I have been to the old pavilion and I know the surrounding area so well it just brought back such nostalgia because I have not been back there in so long and I miss it.