Frank, a senior analyst for Proctor and Gamble, is late for the second time this week thanks to a fender bender that brought morning rush hour traffic to a crawl on Interstate 540. He’ll have to work late again to get his report ready for the meeting tomorrow. With light rail transit in place, Frank could use his 27-mile commute from Fayetteville to Bentonville to work on his report, catch up on his e-mail or read the newspaper. One less car payment would free up some extra dollars for groceries, gas and a summer trip to Disney World that the kids are counting on … Read the rest of this entry »

Washington, DC, (September 17, 2009) – The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has awarded the 2009 Excellence in Green Building Curriculum Recognition Awards and Incentive Grants to organizations and institutions spurring existing green building education projects, activities or programs, and developing Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has received four prestigious awards for its design work.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Society of Architects has awarded a Citation of Urban Design for the MacArthur Park District Master Plan. The plan was designed by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, working with architect William Conway of Conway and Schulte Architects in Minneapolis and landscape architect Tom Oslund of Oslund and Associates, also in Minneapolis. Conway and Oslund are both former visiting professors at the Read the rest of this entry »

The National Endowment for the Arts is awarding a $50,000 grant to the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture. The funding comes as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, commonly referred to as the federal “economic stimulus” program. Read the rest of this entry »

Faculty, staff and students at the Fay Jones School of Architecture’s award-winning Community Design Center visualize a greener, more urban future for the Northwest Arkansas region in the new book NWA Rail: Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas. Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design   Center, has met with various civic groups to discuss the possibility of light rail in northwest Arkansas and will lead a public presentation and discussion at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, July 30, in the Walker Community Room of the Fayetteville Public Library. A companion exhibition will be on display in the library’s reading room from mid-July through August.

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The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach program of the School of Architecture, has won three national awards for a sustainable neighborhood that they designed for the Washington Co. chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach program of the School of Architecture, makes the case for light rail – primarily in pictures – in a book to be published this spring, Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies. Thanks in part to a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Read the rest of this entry »

by Tracy Ostroff and Heather Livingston
Contributing Editors

Summary: Six projects were selected for the 2009 Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design. Two plans are located in China; two in California; and one each in Illinois and Arkansas. The projects focus on mixed-use density and sustainable strategies to renew once-vibrant areas or to make way for new populations and urban development. Two projects renew defunct military bases and transform them into community treasures. Read the rest of this entry »

Two visiting scholars, Eman Abdel-Sabour and Hamoda Youssef, have come from Cairo via graduate studies in Italy to the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, where they have jumped right into a master planning study for Little Rock’s historic McArthur Park. Read the rest of this entry »

A low-cost, low-impact neighborhood designed by university planners, engineers and architecture students for the Washington County chapter of Habitat for Humanity is raking in awards and serving as a model for sustainable development well before ground is broken on the first home. Designed by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center in partnership with the Ecological Engineering Group in the university’s department of biological and agricultural engineering, the city of Fayetteville and McClelland Consulting Engineers, the Porchscapes project has won a 2008 “Achievement in Urban Development Award” from the Arkansas Planning Association. This award follows a 2008 ASLA Honor Award in Planning and Analysis from the American Society of Landscape Architects for Porchscapes, announced last spring. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center shows cities how to plan for the future in a project for Monticello, Ark., that has won a 2008 Unbuilt Architecture Design Award sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects. Instead of dictating the usual laundry list of zoning codes, Monticello: Place-Based Planning in the Five Urbanisms of Every American Townaddresses all parts of the typical American city with a single rule and some guiding principles. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has developed a radical new vision of neighborhood for the Washington Co. chapter of Habitat for Humanity: no sidewalks, no curbs, no gutters and no flooding, even after torrential rain. Instead, residents will benefit from a “shared street” - on track to be the first of its kind in the United States - that promotes community, slows down cars and soaks up stormwater like a sponge. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s one list with Arkansas at the top: the American Institute of Architects has selected three projects by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center to receive 2008 national honor awards for regional and urban design. A release by the American Institute of Architects noted that the Community Design Center “won three of the five awards in this category, displaying an unprecedented concern and devotion for improving the quality of their urban environment.” Only a handful of organizations have matched the near-sweep by the design center in the award program’s 59-year-history, winning three or more honor awards in one category in a single year (they include Chicago powerhouse firms Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, which won multiple awards in 1967, 1998 and 2000, and Murphy/Jahn, which won three architecture honor awards in 2004). The Community Design Center, an outreach of the University of Arkansas School of Architecture, is the only entity from Arkansas to win a national honor award in regional and urban design from the AIA (the design center also won national AIA honors in this category in 2005). Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Arkansas School of Architecture has won national recognition in awards programs co-sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the American Institute of Architects and the American Institute of Architecture Students. The school’s Community Design Center has won two awards for design education, bringing the center’s tally for national education honors to eight awards in just four years. CITYbuild, a consortium of design schools that includes the School of Architecture, has won national recognition for design collaboration.  Read the rest of this entry »

Developing sustainable parks, neighborhoods and cities for a planet fundamentally altered by humans is a challenge that Stephen Luoni faces every day.

“The earth’s atmosphere is a human construction, no longer determined by nature itself. Watersheds reflect our wastes and output - we’ve changed their character a lot. It’s the same with global warming. We need to figure out now, in design and planning, how to deal with these issues,” he said recently. Read the rest of this entry »

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach program of the School of Architecture, has won a 2007 Unbuilt Design Award from the Boston Society of Architects. The award recognizes an ambitious slate of proposals for the “Athletic Valley” on the southwest edge of the University of Arkansas campus. Designed in collaboration with the northwest chapter of Audubon Arkansas, the project was funded by a $190,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency. Read the rest of this entry »

Five new programs focus on the environment, family literacy, health care, day camps and empowering women.

The University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle voted to award $69,575 in grants to support five new initiatives that will focus on important issues on and off campus. The awards were presented April 13. Read the rest of this entry »

EPA grant of $464,000 to UA Community Design Center, Division of Agriculture to fund sustainable housing in Fayetteville. Read the rest of this entry »

Habitat Trails captures Congress for New urbanism 2007 Charter Award

A sustainable neighborhood for the Benton County chapter of Habitat for Humanity that was designed by an interdisciplinary team of University of Arkansas planners, engineers and students has been awarded the 2007 NCARB Prize by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. The UA Community Design Center partnered with Mark Boyer in the department of landscape architecture and Marty Matlock of the Ecological Engineering Group in the department of biological and agricultural engineering to design Habitat Trails. The Rogers neighborhood is currently under construction.

Planning study shows how light rail development in Northwest Arkansas could maintain economic competitiveness and spur environmental sustainability.

An award-winning regional-planning project offers Northwest Arkansas a mass transit model that supports economic development and environmental sustainability. Read the rest of this entry »

Planners and students from the University of Arkansas School of Architecture envision a new housing model for the nation’s aging boomers, one that supports active aging within a vibrant community setting.

In a New York City ceremony Wednesday, Jan. 24, UA Community Design Center staff and a former student pocketed a prestigious Progressive Architecture Design Citation for their master plan for Little Rock’s Good Shepherd Ecumenical Retirement Community. The proposed plan unites traditional neighborhood amenities with strikingly contemporary, “green” design. Read the rest of this entry »

After hours design work has paid off for Peter Bednar and Zack Cooley, both ‘06 grads currently working for the School of Architecture. More

Stephen Luoni joins the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design, where he will teach graduate design studio this fall during a one-semester appointment as the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor. More

Traveling fellowship will support research on historic and new public spaces. Read the rest of this entry »

Teaching faculty recognized for innovative courses

The AIA chose three programs to receive 2006 AIA Education Honor Awards for excellence in course development and architectural teaching. The awards program, now in its 17th year, recognizes collegiate faculty achievements and contributions to education and the discipline of architecture. The awards were announced March 31 during the ACSA Awards Ceremony at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City and will be presented in June during the AIA National Convention in Los Angeles. Read the rest of this entry »

University of Arkansas planners, engineers and students have designed a new kind of neighborhood for the Benton County chapter of Habitat for Humanity. “Green” streets, storm water gardens and wetlands are among the new ideas planned for the Habitat Trails project, which has won the 2006 Education Honors Award from the American Institute of Architects and a planning award in the 2006 EDRA/Places Awards for Place Design, Planning and Research. The 2006 AIA Education Award follows a 2005 Education Award won by UACDC for their work on big box retail stores. Read the rest of this entry »