The UW AIAS Freedom By Design (FBD) team has released a new project booklet documenting the design and build process for the Danny Woo Community Garden Pig Roast Pavilion. The booklet showcases how student designers and builders worked alongside the Chinatown-International District community to rebuild a beloved gathering space, learning valuable lessons in collaborative design and client engagement along the way.
This design-build project asked students to repair and rebuild the pavilion that has anchored Danny Woo Community Garden’s pig roast tradition since 1990, when it was first built by an earlier UW Design-Build team led by Steve Badanes. The garden itself dates to 1975, when Bob Santos struck a $1-a-year agreement with property owner Danny Woo, and the pig roast Santos started in his own backyard in 1976 became an annual community feast — one the garden celebrated its 50th year of this past July. By the time FBD’s team took on the project, the original structure had weathered badly and needed real repair. The team documented existing conditions, attended the pig roast before construction to understand how the community actually used the space, then demolished and rebuilt it from the footings up: drilling out old concrete footings, setting new posts, framing the deck and stairs, and building the benches and CMU block fire pit that anchor the pavilion. Construction ran roughly 180 hours over weekend shifts starting in April. The finished pavilion was ready in time for the community to gather under it for this year’s pig roast — students who’d spent months building the space got to step back and celebrate alongside the neighbors it was built for.
