| Commissioned Work Site: Koh Kood Island, Thailand Design: Kerrie Butts, LEED A.P. and Nilay Mistry, ASLA Masterplan 2012 This project is a conceptual site layout for a forty-room resort that integrates the natural landscape features of the site. The site on Koh Kood Island is set in a sandy cove where part of the land is planted with coconut palms and the majority of the 35-acre site was steeply slope forest. Koh Kood, known for its pristine beaches and unspoiled mangrove-lined estuaries, is the easternmost island in the Gulf of Thailand before reaching Cambodia. Infrastructure on the island remains quite basic with poor roads and twice a day speedboat access from the mainland serving the 1800 residents and also visitors drawn to the island by its natural beauty. Given the limitation of public infrastructure for electricity, phone and water, developments here must be self-reliant. The proposal emphasizes practices for ecotourism such as sustainable practices for water management, energy production, on-site farming to support food needs, and use of local or reclaimed materials. After a preliminary landscape survey to mark out valuable landscape features such as healthy trees, drainage pools, large stones, wind direction, shade, and views. These items are protected and used as the point of departure for the site design. The natural drainage patterns of the site drove the building layout to create enhanced swales that separate the buildings into different zones. Based on the given program requirements for number of rooms for the development, we propose a conceptual site layout plan with building locations, outdoor spaces, circulation paths, and utility placement. The goal was to create a set of drawings that easily tells the main ideas of the design to any contractor or investor and could be used for financial analysis and further design development. |
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