Award winning design

The Community Design Center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

The awards, sponsored by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design, are among the most prestigious awards for American architecture. The awards “identify new cutting-edge design direction, urban philosophy, design approach, style, and intellectual substance in American Architecture today.” The 64 winners of the 2009 awards ranged from skyscrapers to private homes for international clients and were chosen from nearly 1,000 candidates.

The Porchscapes design will be featured with the other winners in an exhibition, “New American Architecture,” which will open in Athens, Greece, and then begin a national tour in the U.S.

“We are pleased that our unique consortium of nonprofits, government agencies and a professional practice is competitive in design quality with some of the most intensely capitalized projects in the world,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center.

Porchscapes is a 43-unit affordable housing neighborhood, designed to demonstrate low impact development technologies in water management. It is a pilot project in the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED Neighborhood Development program, sponsored by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, and the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle.

The American Architecture Award is the fourth national design award the Community Design Center has received for the Porchscapes project.

Sure, rail transit gives people options, but that’s not what fuels the light rail initiative led by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center. According to Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center, which is part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, the most compelling argument for light rail is the urban revitalization that can come with it: “We can use transportation planning to reinvent places that are just languishing,” he said. Sitting in the design center’s work room, surrounded by bass wood models and scribbled plans on a chalkboard wall, Luoni flips open his latest salvo in the campaign for light rail, a glossy new book titled Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies.  A kind of graphic novel for grown ups, Visioning Rail Transit uses diagrams, maps and before-and-after images to explore how light rail and related development could ease traffic congestion, revitalize the downtown core and preserve the rolling green hills and crumbling barns that embody Arkansas’ agricultural past.

“Could downtown Springdale be cool again? You bet,” Luoni said, pointing to a series of images that show the transformation of Springdale’s historic main street to a tree-shaded nexus of cafes, thriving small businesses and housing bustling with people. Planners like Luoni can look beyond the decay of struggling working class towns like Springdale to see the bones of a good downtown - and increasingly, they view light rail as the backbone for smart growth, an antidote to the suburban sprawl and highway gridlock fueled by the almighty automobile.

Money Matters

Northwest Arkansas’ land use.

The figures back them up. According to Visioning Rail Transit, every dollar invested in rail transit generates $6 or more in high quality development. To take just one example, it cost $1.8 billion to build DART, the light rail system based in Dallas, Texas, to its current state of 45 miles on the ground. DART has generated more than $7 billion in existing and planned mixed-use, high-quality development in the past 10 years, according to DART spokesman Morgan Lyons. Light rail also moves four times more traffic, faster, than the interstate can, and lightens fuel emissions in an era when global warming is shifting from threat to reality.

Rail transit makes sense for northwest Arkansas, in particular, because the area’s six cities developed along what is now the the Arkansas and Missouri Railroad.

“More than two-thirds of the region’s population lives within one mile of the rail right-of-way, and five of the region’s top six employers are located along the rail corridor,” Luoni said. “There’s enormous potential to be tapped.”

Though some might argue that rail transit makes sense only in big cities with robust multi-modal transportation systems, in reality two-thirds of the 60 regions that have sought federal funding for rail transit development through the federal “New Start” program are mid-sized cities adopting a “build it and they will come” approach. Would-be players such as Charlotte, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn., both less densely populated than northwest Arkansas, “have flipped the whole game - they’re building the transportation system to get the urbanism they want,” Luoni said.

What’s not to love? Light rail’s estimated $32 million per square mile price tag, for starters. That kind of capital outlay requires a realignment of resources; someone’s going to get a smaller piece of the pie. To justify change at that scale requires big-picture thinking. That’s where Luoni, his staff and students at the Community Design Center come in.

Scenario Planning

The University of Arkansas’ light rail initiative launched in 2006 with three studios involving 40 students, Luoni and three other architecture professors and two visiting consultants: William Conway, a Minneapolis-based architect and planner well-known for his efforts to redefine the public realm, and Eric Kahn, a principal with the Los Angeles firm Central Office of Architecture who has also developed award-winning built works and theoretical planning projects.

Olympic City?

The professors mapped the 32-mile path for light rail, which would connect Fayetteville, a thriving college town, to Bentonville, home to retailing giant Wal-Mart, with a spur to the region’s airport. The architecture students did not develop designs for a light rail system per se; instead, the professors challenged them to imagine development that would support light rail.

“We wanted to engage students in a conceptual chess game using the world, and bring back a set of possibilities to the studio,” said Eric Kahn. The students traveled to Dallas, Minneapolis and Los Angeles to study mass transit-related development and then dug into research and visualization. They used analytical mapping, graphic analysis and modeling to create regional development scenarios that ranged from a financial valley with Wal-Mart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt as anchors to a summer Olympic city that utilized University of Arkansas sports facilities and nearby rivers as venues. Graduate students at the Washington University School of Architecture in St. Louis, where Luoni was a visiting professor, helped visualize how the rail system stations and neighborhood development might take shape.

Why Now?

Marie, an 82-year-old who taught history at Springdale High School for 35 years, handed over her car keys to her daughter a year ago. My mind is sharp, my reflexes less so, she jokes, but today she’s frustrated: she’d like to attend a noon-time talk on painter Marsden Hartley at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located 20 miles north in Bentonville, but doesn’t want to bother her daughter, who’s already taken several hours from work this month to drive her to medical appointments. She’ll settle for another hour of Oprah.

In the car-oriented culture of the United States, the loss of driving privileges leaves many seniors stranded in the suburbs. With baby boomers aging, the need for light rail and the walkable neighborhoods it engenders will continue to grow.

Natural State Sprawl.

“It is projected that by 2050 the number of people 60 and older worldwide will increase by nearly 2 billion,” said Korydon Smith, an associate professor of architecture and author of the forthcoming book Just Below the Line: Disability, Housing, and Equity in the South. “For Arkansas, the 65-plus population will double in the next two decades. With these aging trends, housing and public transportation will be vital to Arkansas’ future.”

There are other reasons why light rail makes sense now, including, somewhat counterintuitively, the recession currently gripping the nation. In April of 2009, President Barack Obama announced more than $16 billion in new funding for high speed rail, praising rail transit as a “smart transportation system equal to the needs of the 21st century” that would reduce dependence on foreign oil, decrease congestion and emissions, boost productivity and create new jobs (30,000 jobs are created for every billion invested in light rail, according to an April 2009 report from the American Public Transportation Association).

Even for those who are gainfully employed, Obama’s support could translate into more dollars to pocket. According to Visioning Rail Transit the average national household spends 18 percent of its annual income on transportation (in Arkansas, the average is 20.5 percent), while the average household in communities with well-established rail transit systems spends 16 percent of its annual income on transportation. A light rail system in northwest Arkansas could generate a 4.5 percent bump in annual income for area households. At the national level, savings are even more significant - Americans living in transit-intensive areas save $22 billion each year by using public transportation, according to Visioning Rail Transit.

What’s Next

Ramay Junior High students Eli, Nile and Charlie are bored. They’re out of school for the summer and Wilson Park pool is closed due to intermittent rain. The boys want to go to the indoor skate park in Springdale, but their parents are at work. So they plug in the XBOX 360 for a round of virtual skateboarding, helping themselves to a family-sized bag of Doritos and sugary soft drinks laced with extra caffeine. If light rail were available, the boys could walk two blocks to the Dickson Street station, ride three stops up the line and spend the afternoon perfecting new moves.

Lenore Skenazy made national news in 2008 with her New York Sun article about letting her nine-year-old son ride the New York City subway alone. Debate continues between parents who want to nurture “free-range kids” and “helicopter parents” who take pains to protect their children from any possible harm, but teenagers’ desire to go places with their friends remains a constant. Light rail and the walkable neighborhoods depicted in Visioning Rail Transit could help parents raise kids who are prepared to explore the world on their own.

Dense downtowns, intact natural areas, cleaner air, a healthier population and transportation options that bring greater freedom to people of all ages, abilities and incomes: the arguments for light rail are compelling, and the Community Design Center has won three national awards for making the case for it in northwest Arkansas, the most recent being a 2008 Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design from the American Institute of Architects. Thanks in part to a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a $4,500 grant from the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle and $16,000 in discretionary funding from the university provost’s office, 2,000 copies of Visioning Rail Transit will be distributed for free to business leaders, government officials and anyone else in the area who is interested in sustainable development.

With its images of sunflower-studded floodplains, futuristic train stations and tree-shaded, people-packed downtowns, Visioning Rail Transit radiates an optimism that is nevertheless grounded in facts and common sense. The book considers, and answers, the cost of light rail relative to automobiles and buses. (Think the car is cheapest? Think again - see graphic.) But Americans love their cars, and change at this scale takes imagination and strong leadership. Steve Luoni admits, albeit reluctantly, that light rail may never come to northwest Arkansas: “The bottom line is that we need to give the region urban options; that’s what we had 80 years ago, when we were a classic transit-oriented development. If we could direct some of the expected growth to urban settings, then this book will have served its purpose,” he said.

The Community Design Center’s big-picture vision to take northwest Arkansas back to its past - a series of urban areas anchored by rail - to create a more sustainable future may be the project’s most enduring legacy. But for the sake of the hypothetical Frank and Marie and the skateboarders, and the real commuters and aging folks and kids that they represent, let’s hope that light rail does happen in northwest Arkansas.

Kendall Curlee
September, 2009

“Through this initiative, USGBC is recognizing those organizations that are taking the lead in the development of innovative green building knowledge and resources,” said Rebecca Flora, Senior Vice President for Education & Research, USGBC. “The extraordinary rise in green building in recent years has accelerated the need for relevant and engaging educational programs, and all of our participating organizations are playing an active role in helping USGBC meet this important need.”

Recognition Awards honor existing green building education projects, activities or programs, and includes a $1,000 honorarium. The Incentive Grants provide monetary support of $10,000 each for schools or organizations to develop new green building curricula. The number of submissions increased over 30 percent in 2009, a significant rise in only the second year of the initiative.

“The growing interest and the impressive number of high-quality submissions indicates the program is reaching a wide-range of educators from many disciplines and that curricula and programs across the country and at various stages in the education process are using green buildings as innovative teaching tools,” noted Margot McDonald, chair of USGBC’s Formal Education Committee and Professor of Architecture at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo.

Winning organizations and institutions include a pre-K and kindergarten curriculum using the school’s LEED Platinum certification to educate students on the value of a green building; a community college’s efforts to expand an existing construction technology program to include a focus on alternative and renewable energy sources; and a multi-year architecture school’s initiative to create a net-zero energy modular classroom prototype that architecture students will use as design studio space, creating a living laboratory.

The recognition awards were judged on demonstrated success, ability to be replicated, scope of influence, advancement of green principles within the educational community and the fostering of a collaborative or interdisciplinary approach. Grant proposals were evaluated on originality, collaborative or interdisciplinary approach, scope of influence, feasibility and the ability to be replicated.

Recipients of USGBC’s 2009 Excellence in Green Building Education Recognition Awards

Pre-K to 12 Category
•4 Habitat: Building a Better Future, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO
•Awareness Appreciation and Advocacy, Learning Gate Community School, Lutz, FL
•Green Dream House Design Contest , Castro Valley High School, San Leandro, CA
•Next.CC, University of Wisconsin/Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI
•“We Share the World” Preschool-Kindergarten Environmental Curriculum, Londonderry School, Harrisburg, PA
Honorable Mentions:
•Green Schools! Initiative, Project Learning Tree, Washington, DC
•Ground Up Design Education Program, Hester Street Collaborative, New York, NY
•The National Energy Education Development (NEED) Project, Covington, KY

Community and Technical Colleges Category
•The Building Energy Technologies Occupational Certificate Program, Wilbur Wright College, Chicago, IL
•Energy Efficient Residential Construction Education, Cleveland State Community College, Cleveland, TN
•Sustainable Design Initiatives (Arch 2840), College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL

Colleges and Universities Category
•The Bridge Studio, Iowa State University, Ames, IA
•The Center for Architecture Science and Ecology’s (CASE) Build Ecologies (BE) Program, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
•Community Design Center: Building Recombinant Ecologies, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, AR
•The Duke Smart Home Program, Duke University, Durham, NC
•Master of Science in Sustainable Design Program, Philadelphia University, Philadelphia, PA

Honorable Mentions:
•Equidistant Projection Exercise Sequence, School of Constructed Environments (SCE), Parsons the New School for Design, New York, NY
•Landscape Architecture Students Help the Post-Disaster Community of Greensburg, KS, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS
•Sci-Tech: A Technology Sequence for Generation Green, Iowa State University, Ames

Recipients of USGBC’s 2009 Incentive Grants

Pre-K to 12 Category
•Teaching Tools for Our Future: Green Building Design/Environmental Innovation at the Ford Rouge!, Ford Rouge Factory Tour, Detroit, MI
Community and Technical Colleges Category
•Sustainable Design and Construction Certificate, Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, Cincinnati, OH

Colleges and Universities Category
• HighPerPod: Zero Energy Classroom, University of Washington, Seattle, WA

Contact: Ashley Katz
Communications Manager, USGBC
202.742.3738
akatz@usgbc.org
Follow us on Twitter at @USGBC

“This is a relatively new award, intended to support programs and projects that advance green building education in a leadership capacity,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. “It is a great honor to receive this recognition for innovative principles in outreach and teaching and for the way our studentsare able to apply what they learn.”

The center also received a national award from the Society of American Registered Architects for the MacArthur Park District Master Plan. The plan was named winner of the society’s 2009 Professional Design Award. The master plan for MacArthur Park in Little Rock was a collaboration with Conway and Schulte Architects, Oslund and Associates, both of Minneapolis; McClelland Consulting Engineers Inc. of Little Rock; and George Wittenberg of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

The MacArthur Park plan also received a 2009 Achievement in Urban Design Award from the Arkansas Chapter of the American Planning Association.

The Community Design Center received an additional state award from the Arkansas Chapter of the American Planning Association. The Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas project earned the 2009 Unique Contribution to Planning Award. The project was a collaboration between the University of Arkansas department of architecture; the Washington University College of Design in St. Louis; William Conway in Minneapolis, and Eric Kahn in Los Angeles.

MacArthur Park District Master Plan

Little Rock’s historic MacArthur Park was cut off from its surrounding neighborhoods in the 1960s, with the construction of interstate highways 30 and 630. In 2008, the city of Little Rock requested proposals to redesign and revitalize the park.

“The design that we presented to the city will restore Arkansas’ premiere urban park as an anchor for a larger urban landscape network,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. “This green network will connect tree-lined streets, boulevards, neighborhood pocket parks, active recreation facilities, plazas, and other pedestrian amenities, amplifying the untapped livability potential of this portion of downtown Little Rock. We’re very pleased that the city approved the plan and delighted that it has been recognized for this prestigious design award.”

This is the first year that design professionals from outside the New York and Boston areas were eligible to compete in the annual Urban Design Award program. The 2009 winners will be exhibited at the annual Build Boston National Expo in November and be published in the annual Design Review by the Boston Society of Architects.

This award is the second received by the MacArthur Park District Master Plan. In February the project received a design award from the Minnesota chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

The NEA has roughly $50 million to distribute to arts organizations around the country, for the purpose of preserving or creating jobs. The Community Design Center will use the grant funds to help pay the salaries of its four full-time staff members.

“The center depends on grants, contracts and donations, in addition to our annual support from the university, to meet our operating expenses,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. “It’s obvious that in the current economic climate this grant from the NEA is very important to us.”

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center was established in 1995 to advance creative development in Arkansas through education, research and design solutions that enhance the physical environment. The professional staff and university students connected to the center have provided innovative and award-winning design and planning services for more than 30 Arkansas communities and organizations, and helping them raise more than $62 million in grant funding to complete suggested improvements. Projects the center has designed include affordable “green” neighborhoods for Habitat for Humanity and the MacArthur Park District Master Plan.

To qualify for a grant an organization must have received a previous NEA grant in the past four years. The Community Design Center and the Arkansas Repertory Theatre Co. were the only two organizations in Arkansas to be awarded the stimulus grants.

Visioning Rail Transit illustrates complex concepts and data with visionary scenarios such as this image of a green, densely urban downtown Springdale.

Thanks to a $25,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a $4,500 grant from the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle and $16,000 in discretionary funding from the provost’s office, 2,300 copies of the book will be distributed for free to business leaders, government officials and anyone in the area who is interested in sustainable development. Copies of the book will be distributed at no charge following Luoni’s presentation at the Fayetteville Public Library.

Though the topic is complex, the book makes a compelling case for light rail with maps, charts and, most especially, graphics that show the possibilities of transit-oriented development.

“This book is designed to help people imagine what this place could be,” Luoni said. “Could downtown Springdale be cool again? You bet,” he added, flipping open the book to a series of images that show the transformation of Springdale’s Emma Street to a tree-shaded nexus of cafes, small businesses and housing bustling with people. The focal point of the final image – a light rail train easing down the center of the street – provides the key to this kind of development.

“We can use transportation planning to reinvent places that are just languishing,” Luoni said, adding that many of the cities that have recently been awarded federal dollars for light rail are following a “build it and they will come” philosophy. Cities such as Charlotte, N.C., and Nashville, Tenn. – both less densely populated than northwest Arkansas – “have flipped the whole game – they’re building the transportation system to get the urbanism they want,” Luoni said.

The 162-page, full-color book culminates a three-year research effort to study the feasibility of light rail in northwest Arkansas. Luoni decided to pursue the idea because “it makes sense here. Eighty years ago this area was a rail region, and because of that, two-thirds of our population live within one mile of the rail right-of-way. There’s enormous potential to be tapped,” he said.

The light rail study involved architecture students and faculty from the University of Arkansas and Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., as well as nationally recognized experts in urban design and planning: William Conway, a Minneapolis-based architect and planner, and Eric Kahn, a principal with the Los Angeles firm Central Office of Architecture.

The project has won three national awards, the most recent being a 2008 Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design from the American Institute of Architects, and has been exhibited in Boston, Mass.; Washington, D.C.; San Antonio, Texas; Cincinnati, Ohio; St. Louis, Mo., Knoxville, Tenn.; and Nashville, Tenn. Luoni hopes to find an exhibition venue in northwest Arkansas.

Organizations interested in having Steve Luoni speak on the benefits of light rail and smart growth should contact Linda Komlos at 479-575-5772.

The Habitat neighborhood fronts a wet meadow that doubles as a city park.

“We’re glad to get the recognition, but this project goes beyond awards and compelling ideas,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. “Our goal is to streamline the use of low impact development technologies for future green neighborhood development.”

The project, which the design center developed in partnership with Professor Marty Matlock of the Ecological Engineering Group in the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, the university’s department of biological and agricultural engineering, the city of Fayetteville and McClelland Consulting Engineers, eliminates curbs, gutters, catch basins, and detention ponds in favor of a “shared street” - on track to be the first of its kind in the United States - that promotes community, calms traffic and soaks up stormwater like a sponge.

“One of our objectives is to demonstrate the multiple benefits of shared streets, rubber sidewalks, and rainwater gardens that are illegal under most current ordinances, except in the most ambitious green communities. A handbook under development by our team will outline the municipal codes and engineering practices necessary to make low impact development a ‘by-right’ development standard,” Luoni said.

Located on Huntsville Road, adjacent to transitional housing for Seven Hills Homeless Center, the 10-acre parcel will include 43 units to be built for approximately $60 per square foot plus infrastructure costs. A wet meadow, rainwater gardens, bioswales, and pervious parking and street surfaces will absorb and treat stormwater on site, a key goal in lowimpact development. With no curbs or gutters needed, infrastructure costs are cut by half, Luoni said.

The U.S. Green Building Council has selected the Fayetteville Habitat neighborhood as a pilot project for LEED-Neighborhood Development certification. The Fayetteville project is one of 60 with priority for certification and special focus group study by the U.S. Green Building Council. A $23,000 grant by the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle, an $8,000 grant from the Kellogg Foundation and a $464,000 grant by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission that is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency have supported the design phase. The project is currently in the engineering phase. Habitat for Humanity plans to launch a fundraising campaign for the project this spring.

“I think it’s awesome that they are getting these awards, and it can’t hurt us with the fundraising,” said Wendi Jones, director of the Washington Co. chapter of Habitat for Humanity. In addition to raising the estimated $2.2 million needed for infrastructure, Jones hopes to establish a long-range plan that will fund all of the houses.

“The neighborhood will not only be environmentally friendly, but will be housing people who need homes,” she said.

Visioning Rail Transit illustrates complex concepts and data with visionary scenarios such as this image of a green, densely urban downtown Springdale.

The grant, which is administered under the NEA’s Access to Artistic Excellence program, marks the first time that the NEA has given a design award to a nonprofit organization in Arkansas since 1995, said Maurice Cox, director of design at the NEA.

“The graphics showing the step-by-step transformations of places over time that would be effected by light rail were particularly compelling,” Cox said. “We felt wide distribution of this book could rally public interest in the future of rail in Arkansas.” Cox also emphasized that the NEA considers national impact in selecting award winners.

“You guys have one of the best design centers in the country,” he said. “Clearly the design center at the U of A is a model to be emulated by others.”

The 200-page, full-color book culminates a three-year research effort to study the feasibility of light rail in northwest Arkansas. The project launched in 2006 with three studios involving 40 School of Architecture students and four professors: Luoni, Aaron Gabriel, Gregory Herman and Tahar Messadi.Other partners in the effort were William Conway, a Minneapolis-based architect and planner; Eric Kahn, a principal with the Los Angeles firm Central Office of Architecture; and graduate students at the Washington University School of Architecture who participated in a design studioled by Luoni.

The project has won numerous awards, most recently a 2008 Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design by the American Institute of Architects, and has been exhibited in Boston, San Antonio, Cincinnati and Seattle. Luoni hopes to find an exhibition venue in northwest Arkansas, ideally to coincide with the release of the book next spring; a speaking tour is also planned.

Luoni credits NEAsupport for helping him hand deliver the book to key audiences throughout the region: “The NEA is not just focused onthe art exhibit in a gallery. They have broadenedthe meaning of artistic excellence to include the design and shaping of our communities,” he said.

Luoni’s recent appointment as a 2008 NEA design panelist offers further evidence for the organization’s interest in urban planning and its recognition of the work Luoni is accomplishing at the University of Arkansas. He visited Washington, D.C., last month to review and jury grants in the Access to Artistic Excellence category, which supports a wide range of artistic endeavors. For more information, visit the NEA’s Web site.

Organizations interested in having Stephen Luoni speak on the benefits of light rail and smart growth should contact Linda Komlos at 479-575-5772.

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.

Project: Porchscapes: Between Neighborhood Watershed and Home
Location: Fayetteville, Ark.
Architect: University of Arkansas Community Design Center
Client: Habitat for Humanity of Washington County
This 43-unit Habitat for Humanity residential project is a pilot LEED®-Neighborhood Development (ND) to be built for $60 per square foot plus infrastructure costs. The objective is to design a demonstration project that combines affordability with best sustainable practices. Porchscapes is a Low Impact Development (LID) project funded under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 319 Program for Nonpoint Source Pollution. LID is an ecological stormwater management approach that sustains a site’s predevelopment hydrologic regime with treatment landscapes distributed throughout the project, i.e. “parks, not pipes.” Neighborhoods are developed as sub-watersheds. The project introduces the “shared street” as a green infrastructure to amplify ecological services delivered by site planning. Based on the socially rich Dutch “living street,” shared streets are designed as multipurpose landscapes, combining pedestrian gathering spaces, parking, landscape systems, and stormwater facilities with traffic throughways. “Fresh ideas and concepts of sustainability are integral to the project, particularly in the way it incorporates the auto into the overall plan and includes landscaping, connections to surrounding environment,” stated the jury. “This project is a great example of a carefully considered shared street.”

Their goal? Absorb – and bring home to Egypt – the Community Design Center’s award-winning ideas on sustainable planning and development.

“Currently Egypt is booming,” said Eman Abdel-Sabour. “There are lots of projects, but we don’t have the new thinking in sustainability.”

“We want to go back and offer something new to our community,” added Hamoda Youssef, who met and married Abdel-Sabour when the two were pursuing post-graduate studies in environmental planning and design at Cairo University. Currently both are pursuing master’s degrees in landscape and environmental planning at the Scuola Superiore di Catania, Italy, which is funding their studies at the University of Arkansas.

Visiting scholars Hamoda Youssef (left) and Eman
Abdel-Sabour are studying sustainable planning at the
School of Architecture’s Community Design Center.

A Web search introduced the couple to the Community Design Center’s work: “We checked the ASLA site, and saw that the design center had won an award for Porchscapes,” Youssef said.

Porchscapes, the design center’s “green” neighborhood for the Washington County chapter of Habitat for Humanity, won a 2008 ASLA Honor Award in Planning and Analysis from the American Society of Landscape Architects.

“This kind of sustainable development is a trend that has to be pursued,” he added. “It benefits not only Arkansas but all of the world.”

Following a flurry of e-mails and a lot of paperwork, the couple arrived in Fayetteville and immediately immersed themselves in master planning for McArthur Park, a large project led by Conway+Schulte Architects of Minneapolis. Other collaborators are Tom Oslund, a Minneapolis-based landscape architect; the urban studies and design department of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; McClelland Consulting Engineers Inc.; and the University of Arkansas Community Design Center.

After just two weeks on campus, Hamoda Youssef is well into master planning a sustainable neighborhood centered on a series of green courtyards, which link to create a green corridor to the western edge of McArthur Park.

“This planning is continuous with the design center’s previous work for Habitat for Humanity and their transit studies. It’s very nice to have a chance to contribute,” he said.

Abdel-Sabour is working on a completely new idea, initially proposed by George Wittenberg at UALR, to design a 50-foot-wide, 1,250-foot-long garden bridge that will span Interstate 630, linking the SOMA (South Main) neighborhood to McArthur Park.

“The idea is to stitch the two parts of the park back together that were divided by I-630 some time ago,” she said. “You will be able to experience the landscape from the car and on the pedestrian path above.”

Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, is delighted to have visiting scholars who bring fresh ideas to the design process. He cites landscape as one area where the visitors bring something new to the drafting table: “Hamoda and Eman are from a dense city in the Arab world; to them, green is precious, while we take it for granted,” he said. “We subtract green to make a city; they humanize cities by introducing green.”

Though perspectives may differ, the design tools and rituals are familiar. At the close of their interview, both Abdel-Sabour and Youssef were back at their computers, their desks littered with flimsy paper sketches and Berol Prismacolor pencils, racing to meet their first deadline: a pin up review on Friday.

Located on Huntsville Road next to transitional housing for Seven Hills Homeless Center, the 10-acre parcel will include approximately 43 housing units, with one-third of the land left in conservation. A wet meadow, rainwater gardens, bioswales, and pervious parking and street surfaces will absorb and treat stormwater on site, a key goal in low-impact development. Porches and “shared streets” foster community interaction.

The U.S. Green Building Council has selected the Fayetteville Habitat neighborhood as a pilot project for LEED-Neighborhood Development certification. A $23,000 grant by the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle and a $464,000 grant by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission that is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency have supported the design phase.

Porchscapes is currently in the planning and engineering phase with construction slated to begin in 2009.

In this rural development a treed buffer zone preserves highway views. Note the church beside a gas station; both provide good street frontage.

The rule is simple: property owners can build whatever they want, wherever they want, so long as they provide street frontage – the porches, terraces and arcades that make great public streets.

“You can build a gas station besidea church – we don’t care – but both have to address the street to create public space,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. And the mobile home, which accounts for 25 percent of all housing starts in the Arkansas Delta?

“We say bring them on,” Luoni said. “But they have to take care of the street, with a porch for example. This system handles even the most meager architecture, because it relies on public infrastructure, not the architecture itself.”

The plan also stands out for addressing the five urban fabrics that characterize American cities built in the last 150 years, from the historic downtown grid to post-war suburbs to rural enclaves. Each form presents opportunities that cities can capitalize on as well as liabilities to be considered.

For example, rural subdivisions, often villainized as sprawl, may contribute to the development of scenic parkways if a 30-foot buffer of trees, meadow or floodplain is preserved or planted along the highway. The Monticello plan also recommends cluster development in rural areas to conserve natural areas and viewsheds. The downside of this type of development is the high cost of installing remote roads, sewer lines and other infrastructure.

“We try to fair cost each one of the pattern types,” Luoni said.

Regardless of pattern type, the plan applies the following principles:

• Mix land uses

• Achieve more compact development to promote walkable neighborhoods

• Integrate environmental and urban systems

• Enhance connections between city sectors

Most important, and most radical: the design center’s plan scraps the zoning map that underpins most city planning efforts in favor of a master street plan.

“It’s all about street designand the architectural frontage of the street,” Luoni said, noting the narrow streets and continuous arcades in New Orleans as one example where great streets make a great city.

As for Monticello, response has been positive.

“It’s a great plan. Now we’re trying to implement it – that’s the fun part,” said Bennie Ryburn, owner of a Toyota dealership who serves as president of the Monticello Economic Development Commission. The city of Monticello has cleaned up 60 to 70 lots downtown that are now available for infill development, and members of the Monticello Economic Development Commission are currently networking with other towns that have adopted place-based planning to draw up specific ordinances.

Monticello: Place-Based Planning in the Five Urbanisms of Every American Town is one of four projects selected from 64 international submissions to win a 2008 Unbuilt Architecture Design Award sponsored by the Boston Society of Architects. The four projects will be exhibited and discussed in a special forum at Build Boston, the annual design convention in Boston, Nov. 18-20. The projects also will be exhibited at the Architects Building in Boston in 2009 and included in the January/February 2009 design awards issue of ArchitectureBoston magazine. For more information visit the Web site for Boston Society of Architects at www.architects.org.

Monticello: Place-Based Planning is the fourthdesign center project that has won Unbuilt Architecture honors from the Boston Society of Architects, which hosts one of the top four national architectural design awards programs in the United States.

“Designers are looking for concepts that are transportable, that are models addressing environmental issues confronted by all, and not just a resolution for a single project,” Luoni said. “That’s probably why we have done well with the BSA’s Unbuilt Architecture award program.”

The “shared street” in this design calms traffic, treats stormwater and promotes community in a plaza-like garden space.

“In this neighborhood, the street is the yard,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. “By combining pedestrian and traffic systems in a space akin to a plaza, we permanently slow down the car and create great moments for chance social encounters.”

The project, which the design center developed in partnership with Professor Marty Matlock of the Ecological Engineering Group in the University of Arkansas Division of Agriculture, the university’s department of biological and agricultural engineering, the city of Fayetteville and McClelland Consulting Engineers, has won a 2008 ASLA Honor Award in Planning and Analysis from the American Society of Landscape Architects. A $23,000 grant by the University of Arkansas Women’s Giving Circle and a $464,000 grant by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission that is funded by the Environmental Protection Agency have supported the design phase.

“The University of Arkansas is taking a leadership role with this low-impact development project,” said Bobby Hernandez, community planner for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 6, which includes Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and New Mexico. Hernandez also serves as technical adviser for Arkansas’ program to reduce water pollution from general sources, the “319 Nonpoint Source Pollution Program.”

“I don’t know of any other project that we’ve funded in our region that comes close to what the university has done in demonstrating low-impact development’s role in decreasing stormwater runoff. This is a great example to other communities,” Hernandez said.

Located on Huntsville Road, adjacent to transitional housing for Seven Hills Homeless Center, the 10-acre parcel will include approximately 50 units, with one-third of the land left in conservation. A wet meadow, rainwater gardens, bioswales, and pervious parking and street surfaces will absorb and treat stormwater on site, a key goal in low-impact development. With no curbs, gutters and pipes needed, infrastructure costs are cut by half, Luoni said.

Architecture students Keith Wheeler and Russell Worley were charged with designing homes for the neighborhood. Challenged by Habitat’s request for low-cost, one-story homes with modest roof pitches and limited square footage, they focused on the porch.

“We tried to create a value that doesn’t exist in the standard Habitat house. Each house responds to its neighbor, the street and the park,” said Wheeler, a fourth-year student from Fayetteville, Ark. The students’ spacious screened porches, some with green walls, others with loggias or attached patios, extend housing square footage at one-quarter of the cost of conditioned space and lend variety to the streetscape.

“The porches are a really good amenity, for the street as much as for the houses,” Luoni said. “They amplify the social capital that’s lacking in the typical subdivision.” The development also avoids cookie-cutter banality by including several house types: an L-shaped house for corner lots, a shed-roofed house to harvest southern sunshine, and mews housing built along garden walkways. To reduce the development footprint, key to decreasing stormwater runoff, design center staff included duplex and triplex housing for one-third of the units and used small, 2,500-square-foot lots - about half the size of the typical suburban lot. Some of the homes have small front yards; many sit directly on the shared street.

“If you’re going to create a small lot development, you’ve got to reciprocate with great neighborhood features. That builds value for the house and leverages the investment the homeowners have made,” Luoni said.

Though dense development is a new model for Habitat for Humanity, Washington County director Patsy Brewer is happy to be ahead of the curve in developing sustainable housing.

“This pilot project is helping us to be better stewards of the land, which we have wanted to do for some time,” she said. “We hope that not only local developers, but other Habitat affiliates will use this as a model for green development.”

The Fayetteville project builds on the success of an earlier Habitat neighborhood in Rogers that won nine regional and national design awards. Infrastructure in the Rogers neighborhood is built and is performing well, Luoni said, though some flooding occurs in the wet meadow due to development at an adjacent site.

The U.S. Green Building Council has selected the Fayetteville Habitat neighborhood as a pilot project for LEED-Neighborhood Development certification. The Fayetteville project is one of 60 with priority for certification and special focus group study by the U.S. Green Building Council. Habitat for Humanity hopes to complete development plans for the neighborhood by the end of this year.

The proposed light rail system would check sprawl and ease traffic gridlock in Northwest Arkansas.

“It was delightful to see such thoughtful urban design thinking coming from the academy,” said Harry G. Robinson, a professor of urban design at Howard University and principal of TRGConsulting who chaired the jury. “Their use of urban design as a sustainability strategy at several scales of intervention affirms the possibilities of the discipline to impact positively the environment and how the earth is inhabited. The UA design center is a model that other architecture programs should follow in engaging their host communities.”

The three projects recognized include:

Parks and gardens foster community and treat stormwater in the Habitat Trails development, cutting infrastructure costs by more than one-third.

Habitat Trails, a sustainable neighborhood for the Rogers chapter of Habitat for Humanity. The five-acre low-impact development includes 17 dwelling units and preserves a third of the site for parks, gardens and meadows that treat stormwater while fostering community. The jury praised the project for demonstrating “how a sustainable landscape can blend seamlessly with good urban design and architecture.” Community design center staff collaborated with Marty Matlock in the department of biological and agricultural engineering, Mark Boyer in the department of landscape architecture, and 12 architecture and engineering students to develop Habitat Trails, which is currently under construction.

Cars, pedestrians, cyclists and wildlife share green space in the design center’s campus plan.

In Campus Hydroscapes, community design center staff and students developed an ambitious slate of proposals for the “Athletic Valley” on the southwest edge of the University of Arkansas campus. Planning focused on remediating the College Branch stream, which is prone to erosion, flooding and pollution due to surrounding development. Solutions ranged from stormwater gardens to the transformation of a nine-acre parking lot to a marsh coupled with a multistory parking garage, visitors’ center and transportation hub that would provide a needed campus gateway. The jury noted that the project provides “multiple opportunities to control the ecological footprint of the campus infrastructure and turn the river’s adjacent surfaces from liability to asset within current political and financial circumstances.” The design center collaborated with the northwest chapter of Audubon Arkansas on this project, which was funded by a $190,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas united students from the University of Arkansas and Washington University in St. Louis in addressing a thorny regional planning issue: light rail. Studios at both universities explored how light rail and associated transit-oriented development could ease traffic gridlock, spur downtown revitalization and check sprawl in Northwest Arkansas. The jury said the master plan “creates cities for humans versus cities for autos . . . With major growth coming, this is a chance to do it right from the outset.” Design center staff and students partnered with Eric Kahn, a principal with the Los Angeles firm Central Office of Architecture, and William Conway, a Minneapolis-based architect and planner, on this project.

“These latest awards confirm that our design center’s multifaceted, collaborative approach to sustainable design is the future of regional and urban planning,” said Jeff Shannon, dean of the School of Architecture. “We are proud to offer this resource to our students and the state.”

For more information on the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, visit the center’s Web site at http://uacdc.uark.edu/.

To learn more about sustainable research and project development at the university, visit http://sustainability.uark.edu/.

The awards will be presented at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Architects in Boston, May 15-17, 2008. For more information on the association’s awards program, visit the association’s Web site.

Students James Sullivan, left, and Nathan Dalke present design ideas for Miss Gloria’s Kitchen in New Orleans. The project is one of many efforts supported by CITYbuild, a consortium launched by a University of Arkansas conference.

The 2007-2008 Housing Design Education Award for Excellence in a Housing Education Course, co-sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architects, recognizes Habitat Trails, a sustainable neighborhood for the Rogers chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Community design center staff collaborated with Marty Matlock in the department of biological and agricultural engineering and Mark Boyer in the department of landscape architecture to develop Habitat Trails, which is currently under construction. Twelve architecture and engineering students also shaped design for the project, which has won nine planning and education awards, eight of them national in scope.

The second award, a New Faculty Teaching Award, co-sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architecture Students, honors Aaron Gabriel, assistant director of the design center and an adjunct assistant professor in the department of architecture, for “demonstrated excellence in teaching performance” during the formative years of his career. Gabriel has been a key component of the design center team since 2003, helping to develop new models for municipal and private development that have won 23 design, planning and education awards.

Aaron Gabriel discusses student work.

“Professor Gabriel combines sophisticated insights on pedagogy with the design and planning skills of a talented practitioner - particularly rare in young faculty,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the design center. “Similar to instruction in the teaching hospital, he models for our students dedication, commitment to excellence, and critical practitioner thinking.”

Gabriel earned a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in May of 2003 and a Bachelor of Design from the University of Florida in 1997. He was awarded a traveling fellowship to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich (ETH) in the spring of 2002, and was a Skidmore Owings and Merrill traveling fellow candidate in 2002. With partner Katherine Chang he developed quarters for transitional homeless housing that were selected as one of five winning entries for the Common Ground Community’s First Step Housing Competition in 2003. A prototype was built in New York City and is featured in the 2006 book Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises.

The third award, the 2007-08 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award, recognizes the CITYbuild Consortium of Schools. Launched by the December 2005 Arkansas Summit, which was organized and hosted by the School of Architecture, CITYbuild is a collective of national university-based programs working cooperatively to address the challenges of rebuilding New Orleans, post-Katrina. School of Architecture faculty and students redesigned and have begun construction on Miss Gloria’s Kitchen, a restaurant and focal point for the Gert Town neighborhood that has been shuttered since Hurricane Katrina. Other schools and organizations participating in CITYbuild include the University of Kansas, Tulane University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California and Design Corps.

The awards will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Houston, March 27-30, 2008. All three awards will be included in a book on the 2007-08 education awards to be co-published by the ACSA and the American Institute of Architects.

“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.

Stephen Luoni

As director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, Luoni has led a number of award-winning projects that enhance the natural environment, promote economic development and improve public health. He will discuss his multifaceted approach to planning and design in a lecture titled “Building Recombinant Ecologies” at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 4, at the Arkansas Arts Center lecture hall in Little Rock, Ark. Luoni plans to discuss projects that range in scale from a “green” neighborhood for Habitat for Humanity to a proposed light rail system that would serve the entire northwest Arkansas region.

Stephen Luoni’s design and research have won more than 40 design awards, including two Progressive Architecture Awards, an American Institute of Architects Honors Award, and two American Society of Landscape Architecture Awards, all for planning and urban design.

Under Luoni’s leadership as director and holder of the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies, the Community Design Center has picked up 23 regional, national and international design and planning awards, and six national education awards. Current work includes design and planning for municipal infrastructure, residential communities, campuses, parks and big box retail. For more information on the design center’s projects visit its Web site.

Luoni’s work has been published in Oz, Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Architect, Places, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’ hui, Progressive Planning and Public Art Review. He previously taught at the University of Florida and was the 2000 Cass Gilbert Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. In Fall 2006 he was the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor in Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis.

Luoni’s lecture is part of an ongoing series co-sponsored by the University of Arkansas School of Architecture, the Arkansas Arts Center and the central Arkansas section of the American Institute of Architects. A 6 p.m. reception will precede the lecture.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Continuing Education Units will be awarded to design professionals.

A parking lot transformed into wetlands. A boardwalk on the adjacent parking garage allows visitors to observe birds and other wildlife.

The addition of storm water gardens to campus parking lots would treat polluted runoff at its source.

The green roof of the proposed dam theater could function as a park for boaters and entrance to performance space below.

Though the award recognizes work in the design phase, Community Design Center director Steve Luoni hopes that their proposals will be implemented over time.

“This project gives the University of Arkansas the tools to be a model in sustainable planning and design, supporting the chancellor’s commitment to create a sustainable campus,” he said.

Planning focuses on the College Branch stream, which originates on campus. Because it is channeled beneath the football stadium, practice fields and adjacent parking lots before emerging by the former site of Carlson Terrace student housing, the stream is prone to system dysfunctions, including erosion and pollution. Storms trigger dangerous flash floods that threaten nearby walks and bridges, including the Sixth Street bridge on Highway 62B.

To correct these problems, design center staff and students proposed a range of interventions that could be built over time. The introduction of storm water gardens in lot 56, the nine-acre parking lot at the corner of Sixth Street and Razorback Road, would allow for immediate treatment of runoff, which in the first hour of rainfall has a pollution index twice that of raw sewage, Luoni said. Slowing the velocity of urban storm water and improving the ability of the water to percolate through the soil are two of the most effective techniques for reducing urban storm water pollution. The most radical move would be to transform lot 56 into a marsh, shifting needed parking to a garage, visitors’ center and transportation hub stacked at the edge of the field. The multistory building would create a gateway feature sorely needed in this area of campus.

“There’s something very attractive about having a parking garage float over a marsh,” Luoni mused. “Urbanism and ecology are not mutually exclusive, but can exist side by side and create poetic moments.”

Properly managed, the stream has the potential to amplify the university’s educational mission, said former project coordinator Melissa Terry: “College Branch is an invaluable asset to the University of Arkansas campus in that it functions as a living laboratory for faculty, students and administrators alike. They can use the features of this urban stream to increase campus sustainability, improve urban water quality and incorporate various restoration tools as teaching models for future professionals.”

“We congratulate CDC on another award winning design effort with their College Branch proposals,” said Mike Johnson, associate vice chancellor of Facilities Management. “These proposals have provided us with a number of valuable ideas to continue our transformation of this area of campus into a sustainable/green design showcase. Our hopes are to transform a number of these ideas from CDC and others into reality as prototypes for our entire local community to view, touch, feel and experience.”

Design center staff members Jeffrey Huber and Peter Bednar, in collaboration with Zack Cooley, a 2006 graduate of the School of Architecture, also won a 2007 Unbuilt Design Award for their proposal to float a slender bar-shaped park and theater on top of Beaver Dam. Cantilevered out over a river valley, the auditorium terminates in a transparent polycarbonate wall that offers breathtaking views of the Ozark Plateau.

“The performance can range from a symphony to the changing of seasons, inviting the audience to simultaneously experience event and place,” said Jeffrey Huber. A key feature of the design is the “closed loop” water treatment system that would harvest, filter and use water from the lake. Wastewater from kitchen and bathroom facilities would be treated within a vertical garden that extends from the underside of the theater and then released into the river below.

Huber, Bednar and Cooley collaborated on several design competitions, but their partnership is on hold for now: Cooley is pursuing a master’s degree in architecture at Princeton University, Bednar is pursuing his master’s degree in architecture at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, and Huber is pursuing a partnership at an architectural firm in Florida.

The Boston Society of Architects awards program is one of four premiere national design award programs in architecture. The award-winning projects from the University of Arkansas were among seven projects selected from more than 80 submissions. They will be discussed and exhibited at Build Boston, an annual convention scheduled for Nov. 13-15 of this year, and will be published in the January/February 2008 issue of ArchitectureBoston.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has won two prior unbuilt design awards from the Boston Society of Architects. The first, in 2003, explored the idea of stacking big box retail stores into a “vertical power center.” The second, in 2005, fleshed out plans for the 1,000-acre Two Rivers Park located six miles from downtown Little Rock. For more information on design center projects, visit the center’s Web site at http://uacdc.uark.edu/.

To learn more about green research and project development at the university, visit http://sustainability.uark.edu/.

For more information on the Boston Society of Architects unbuilt design award program, visit http://www.architects.org/.

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.

Jane Shipley (right) presents a $23,000 Women’s Giving Circle grant to the School of Architecture

The projects that received funding this year are as follows.

The School of Architecture was awarded $23,000 for the project titled “From Infill Houses to Inclusive ‘Green’ Neighborhoods: Housing Arkansas Families in Need.” Habitat for Humanity has partnered with the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, which is an outreach education, research and design center for the School of Architecture. Together, the groups will plan and build a 30-unit “green” neighborhood in Fayetteville. The project, led by Aaron Gabriel, adjunct assistant professor of architecture and assistant director of the UACDC, will be a combination of watershed planning, neighborhood development and conservation development that merges new methods for achieving affordability with exemplary neighborhood design. The Women’s Giving Circle grant will not only enable the stability of 30 Habitat for Humanity families, but it will also establish a model neighborhood for families in need across Arkansas.

“This is How We Do It: Women Empowering Women” is a program developed by the university’s Career Development Center in the Division of Student Affairs, led by Angela Williams. With a grant of $13,500, a new workshop will be added to the series of programs currently offered by the center. The goal of the new workshop is to prepare female college students for the world of work by providing information and success strategies to overcome barriers faced by women in the workplace, and by providing them the mentorship of successful women from various occupations. The program will include one annual networking event with a panel of successful women and four professional development seminars with executive women as speakers each academic year. The seminars will focus on balancing work and family, breaking the glass ceiling, implementing success strategies and overcoming barriers to success.

Third, the department of electrical engineering received $11,575 to establish the Engineering and Math Summer Day Camp for Girls, an engineering recruitment and diversity initiative focused on creating interest in science and engineering in the female population. Targeting female students in Springdale’s middle and junior high schools, the program is designed to increase the number of female students in the Springdale High School pre-engineering program. This program intends to form a pipeline of students that will major in engineering and science disciplines at the University of Arkansas and eventually graduate from the university. It is the goal of the summer camp to reflect the diversity in the Springdale school system with the summer camp attendees. The cornerstones of the summer camp involve hands-on engineering and math educational activities, field trips and mentoring. Susan Burkett, associate professor of electrical engineering, is the lead faculty member for this program.

The department of English in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences received $11,000. In collaboration with the Woodruff County Literacy Council, “Family Literacy in Woodruff County: Teaching Reading and Computer Literacy to Parents and Their Children” will engage 20 parents - young mothers - who have low reading ability and no computer-literacy skills to develop their own reading, writing and technological proficiencies while they are learning to engage their children in literacy-rich activities and while the children are also learning computer-literacy skills. Families will be given the tools to begin a home-reading program that will prepare the children for success in school and it will help the parents work toward securing G.E.D. certificates and become more employable. This program will be one of the basic elements of two Community Literacy Advocacy offices that will be created in Augusta, Ark., and Pine Bluff, Ark. The project is led by David Jolliffe who holds the Brown Chair in English Literacy.

The final program supported by this year’s Women’s Giving Circle grants is “Meeting the Health Needs of Family Caregivers,” a proposal from Ro DiBrezzo and Barbara Shadden in the Office for Studies on Aging in the College of Education & Health Professions. The money will fund a workshop series for caregivers aimed at improving their physical and emotional health and reducing stress associated with giving care. The series will provide access to and information about a wide variety of local, regional and national resources. Also, caregivers will receive valuable information about coping strategies and improving personal health. Participants will be invited to take part in pre-workshop interviews that will help to guide topic selection for the workshops.

The Women’s Giving Circle was created in 2002 by the founding members of the Women and Philanthropy Committee of the Campaign for the Twenty-First Century. Members of the circle consider funding proposals for campus projects on an annual basis and every member of the circle votes on which project or projects will receive funding for the current year.

The monies will support planning and design of a sustainable neighborhood for Habitat for Humanity of Washington County. McClelland Consulting Engineers and the city of Fayetteville also will partner on the project. The eight-acre parcel is located on Huntsville Road, adjacent to land set aside for transitional housing for Seven Hills Homeless Center and Sage House.

Shared streets, high-density housing, rain gardens and other sustainable storm water management systems will be designed, built and studied. The goal is to implement low-impact development that will reduce non-point source pollution - toxins that can’t be traced to a factory or other single source.

“Sediment is our big concern,” said Marty Matlock. “The run off from this site hits a tributary that drains directly into the West Fork of the White River, which has been highly impacted by sediment from urban stream alteration.” Sediment loading erodes streams and compromises their ability to treat and remove pollutants from the urban watershed. Pesticides, herbicides and contaminants such as oil and heavy metals that wash off of parked cars compound the problem.

“Just go out to a parking lot and scrape up a little bit of sludge on top of the asphalt - it’s just loaded with stuff,” Matlock said, adding, “Our little project won’t solve the problem. It’s an illustration of how we could implement a citywide solution to watershed pollution.”

Matlock will work with McClelland Engineers and seven engineering students to design, model, and measure low-impact storm water management strategies that are distributed across the site. Technologies such as bioswales and riparian greenways are not new, but their integration into a fully engineered and tested system is, Matlock said.

Steve Luoni, director of the community design center, has developed an extensive toolkit of green design strategies that he is eager to use in this project.

“We want to be the first in the U.S. to build the shared street,” he said. Common in the Netherlands, the shared street meanders to slow cars and incorporates pedestrian courts, on-street parking, rain gardens and tree bosques.

“Essentially, we’re designing the street as a public garden,” Luoni said.

To cut costs and reduce the development footprint, design center staff and seven architecture students will design both single-family homes and attached housing types such as mews, which are built along garden walkways.

The Fayetteville project builds on the success of an earlier Habitat neighborhood in Rogers that won five regional and national design awards. With infrastructure 90 percent complete and one home built and inhabited, the Rogers project presented real-world challenges for UA planners.

“We’ll have to use a fire truck template for this project,” Luoni said with a grin, referring to the need to accommodate 80,000-pound trucks on the narrow, pedestrian-friendly streets that they envision.

Design center staff and architecture students already have begun planning the neighborhood, and the project team expects to break ground on the development sometime in 2008.

“We’re excited about this project,” said Patsy Brewer, executive director of the Washington County chapter of Habitat for Humanity. “To have someone with expertise come in and do land planning and new design for houses - that is a double blessing. This neighborhood will meet our needs for quite a while.”

Mayor Dan Coody, for his part, believes that the project will be an exemplar for other cities across the nation: “Fayetteville is developing a reputation nationwide as a city that has made sustainable growth and development a top priority. The city is very pleased to work with the university and Habitat on this project. It’s the way we like to see business done in Fayetteville, and I hope this is the first of many sustainable, affordable, low-impact residential developments in our community.”

The project team also will produce a low-impact development manual for use by planners, developers and designers across the state of Arkansas.

This project is one of many sustainable initiatives spearheaded by the University of Arkansas. To learn more about green research and project development at the university, visit http://sustainability.uark.edu.