Rwandan Neighborhood Design Wins Top Honors in Charter Awards Program

Creative Corridor for Little Rock’s Main Street also earns award

A collaboration between the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, the Fay Jones School of Architecture, the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, and Peter Rich Architects took the Grand Prize, the top professional honor, in the 2013 Charter Awards, sponsored by the Congress for the New Urbanism.The Congress is the leading international organization promoting walkable, mixed-use neighborhood development, and sustainable communities. The Charter Awards recognize excellence in urban design.

Building Neighborhoods that Build Social and Economic Prosperity: Manual for a Complete Neighborhood – a holistic design approach for a neighborhood in Rwanda’s capital city, Kigali – received a $5,000 award, sponsored by Target.

The Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School, was also a collaborator, with Marlon Blackwell Architect, for design ofThe Creative Corridor: A Main Street Revitalization for Little Rock. The project won a Charter Award in the Neighborhood, District and Corridor category of the awards program.

Winning projects fulfill and advance the principles of the Charter of the New Urbanism, which defines the essential qualities of walkable, sustainable places from the scale of the region down to those of the neighborhood and the building.

The 13th annual awards program attracted a competitive field from around the world, and 14 projects from a pool of more than 100 submissions were recognized with awards and honorable mentions.

The Kigali project, which features a proposed design for the Kimichanga neighborhood at 200 units per hectare, doubles as an instructional manual on hillside development for the Ministry of Infrastructure in Kigali. The challenge facing the ministry is to transition land settlement from informal patterns to formal neighborhood patterns based on closed-loop, sustainable principles responsive to low-resource environments, alternative energy production, regenerative landscapes, waste recycling and local food production. Urban redevelopment during Rwanda’s recovery since 1994 has been underwritten by foreign entities based on suburban and capital-intensive models unsympathetic to local settlement patterns.

The Charter Awards jury praised this project for the way it approached Kigali’s challenging terrain, where most of the city’s population lives in informal hillside settlements. “The landscape prohibited a simple block format,” said architect and jury member Vanessa September, also a resident of Africa. “So they were very creative and innovative in the way they took that form and rolled it over the landscape of Kigali.” The frames of the buildings are designed to be modular, with modules that can be arranged and modified to fit the needs of the users. The project also provides general tactics for hillside development applicable to the city as a whole.

Jury member Jason McLennon noted the project’s sophisticated treatment of infrastructure such as transportation and water. Careful project siting and features such as vertical gardens and solar chimneys are elements of an approach that emphasizes distributed, multi-use infrastructure. The jury concluded that the project exemplifies how developing countries like Rwanda, one of the world’s poorest nations, “can transition from informal to formal settlement patterns with an eye towards resiliency, sustainability, and local social vitality.”

“We are so pleased to have been recognized with CNU’s coveted top honor and trust that this strengthens our team’s case for implementing place-based development that better serves Rwanda’s interests,” said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center.

The Little Rock Creative Corridor proposal retrofits a four-block segment of endangered historic downtown Main Street through redevelopment catalyzed by the cultural arts rather than Main Street’s traditional retail base. Knowing that developers will build large infill structures based on contemporary aesthetics rather than historical Main Street styles, the retrofit creates compatibility through unique townscaping structures that frame a new, land-use ecology of residential, tourism, work and the cultural arts – a new identity for Main Street.

The initial design planning for this project was sponsored in part by a $150,000 Our Town grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011. In developing the plan, designers worked with more than 30 organizations, including real estate developers, art institutions, local businesses and public agencies.

Jury member Colleen Carey praised the project for exemplifying how urbanists can work with areas larger than a block but smaller than an entire neighborhood. While focused on particular public realm enhancements, each enhancement is rooted in this larger transformation of the area’s function in the city.

Jury members appreciated that the plan focused on incrementalism, acknowledging the complex community and market realities of fostering change in an existing neighborhood. The proposal provides for discrete phases, each of which brings positive benefits to the area.

“The design framework taps into many years of diligent work and focused community organization by the city of Little Rock,” Luoni said. “The Creative Corridor is now seeing tens of millions of dollars in new investments from both the public and private sectors, which is terribly exciting. Little Rock has the chance to create a national model demonstrating the centrality of the arts in broad-based economic and social development.”

These award-winning projects were featured at CNU 21, the organization’s annual congress, held in May in Salt Lake City. Award winners and honorable mentions, along with full project descriptions and images, are listed on the CNU 21 website. CNU will also publish a book of award-winning projects.

Architecture Students Part of Arts Grant

UA pupils to develop plan for housing, studios, venue

By TRACIE DUNGAN, ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

The University of Arkansas’ Community Design Center and architecture students will create an urban-design plan for an arts district in downtown Fayetteville during the coming school year, the center’s director said Monday.

The center received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the work on the plan, which center staff and fifth-year architecture students from the Fayetteville campus will begin this fall, director Stephen Luoni said.

The design plan will propose two main things. The first is the transformation of the parking lot west of the Walton Arts Center, at the corner of Dickson Street and West Avenue, into a development that would mix artists’ housing and studio space with commercial space and a “pocket park,” Luoni said Monday.

The second involves the design of a new “streetscape” for West Avenue that would create a public venue for festivals and other gatherings, similar to the use of Fayetteville Square downtown, he said.

“Right now, it’s just built like a traffic throughput, so it feels like a traffic corridor,” Luoni said of West Avenue.

The plan may go for an “urban room” design that feels more enclosed, he said, so that it could accommodate foot traffic, limited vehicle traffic and public gatherings.

The artists’ housing and work spaces would be flexible so that an artist could live adjacent to or over a studio, the latter of which could be open to the public or closed, depending on the tenant, Luoni said. The housing flexibility also might mean that people in professions other than art might live and work there.

In fact, “lofts” built to accommodate either an apartment or small shop are the latest trend in urban housing around the country, he said.

“People want to live downtown, and they want a lot of open spaces with nice light,” Luoni said. That includes baby boomers retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day around the country, as well as the 80 percent of college graduates moving to cities these days, he said.

“So all the housing trends point to urban housing. You see that happening in Fayetteville already with the multifamily housing coming up in downtown.”

In a news release the university issued Monday, it said Steve Clark, president and chief executive officer of the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, had written a letter in support of the grant proposal because the idea meshes with the city’s master plans. The plans call for making downtown more pedestrian-friendly and more attractive for people who want to live and work there.

The city also backs the effort, said Jeremy Pate, the city’s director of development services.

“We are a partner on this,” Pate said. “We wrote a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts, signed by the mayor.”

City officials are excited about the UA center’s design work, he said, because it dovetails with current plans, including the Walton Arts Center’s planned $20 million investment in expansion and the city’s Entertainment District parking-deck project. In early December, the Fayetteville City Council chose a site for the deck, which would add roughly 250 spaces, behind the arts center and bordered by West Avenue, Spring Street and School Avenue.

Decks like the one the city plans “free up the surface lots for higher and better uses,” Luoni said. “It’s classic ‘urbanism.’ You use the former surface lots for housing and other things that reinforce downtown livability.

“In Fayetteville, land is becoming more valuable, so this is a natural evolution for the city.”

The UA plans also mesh with a downtown master plan the city approved in 2004, as well as its citywide master plan for 2025-30, Pate said.

Luoni said his planners are mindful not only of the master plans and imminent projects, but existing uses of the city’s downtown spaces, such as farmers markets and the annual Bikes, Blues and BBQ festival.

The center and the students will complete final drawings and models in spring 2014, UA said in a news release.

Pate said the city’s subsequent actions could go a number of directions, such as accepting the design plans, accepting them with modifications, or determining they’re not feasible. The next steps after design completion would hinge on the magnitude of changes the plans envision.

The UA grant announced Monday was one of 50 awards in a category dedicated to design. In all categories, 817 projects totaling $26.3 million in grants were awarded, according to the university.

Community Design Center Awarded $30,000 NEA Art Works Grant for Arts District Design Plan

Funding to support pedestrian-oriented environment, mixed-use area

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center has received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support preparation of an urban design plan for an arts district in downtown Fayetteville.

The Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture, is one of 50 programs to receive a 2013 Art Works grant in the design category from the NEA. The grants for all 817 funded projects in all categories total $26.3 million. The center’s mission is to advance creative development in Arkansas through education, research and design solutions that enhance the physical environment.

 “The National Endowment for the Arts is proud to support these exciting and diverse arts projects that will take place throughout the United States,” said John Shigekawa, NEA acting chairman. “Whether it is through a focus on education, engagement or innovation, these projects all contribute to vibrant communities and memorable opportunities for the public to engage with the arts.”

Although the city of Fayetteville already has a designated cultural district consisting of a majority of the downtown, no physical framework or anchor exists to give the scattered cultural assets an identity, said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. The NEA grant proposes establishment of an arts district core around West Avenue and the Walton Arts Center.

The NEA funding will support the Community Design Center – working in collaboration with the city of Fayetteville, the Fayetteville Chamber of Commerce, and the arts center – as it prepares a plan that includes two main components. One of these is a new streetscape for West Avenue that provides a public venue for festivals and other civic gatherings. The second involves the schematic design of the parcel west of the arts center as a mixed-use development featuring housing (including live/work space for artists), commercial space and a pocket park.

Luoni said a designed arts district would be valuable to Fayetteville because the city already hosts and celebrates countless arts events and programs.

“A district plan will provide a pedestrian-oriented environment important to the continued success of downtown’s cultural and commercial functions. The district plan also optimizes the potential of new investments as the downtown grows denser and more complex,” he said.

For example, the current street geometry of West Avenue promotes high traffic speed, while the large-scale surface parking lot on its west side doesn’t advance livability of the downtown area. The streetscape and block redevelopment will complement the estimated $20 million in improvements that the Walton Arts Center plans to make to the performing arts center property and the Nadine Baum Studio over the next several years.

“The proposal will also coordinate with other improvements scheduled by the city and private property owners to make a ‘complete neighborhood,’ enhancing the downtown’s capacity as a regional destination,” Luoni said.

Steve Clark, president and chief executive officer of the Chamber of Commerce, said he wrote a letter in support of the NEA grant proposal because this idea is consistent with the city’s plans for 2025 and 2035. Those plans envision making downtown friendlier to pedestrians and more appealing for people who want to live and work in the area. That concentration of people also encourages investment in both housing and commercial entities, such as restaurants and retailers.

“An arts district would be a real plus for us,” he said. “For economic development reasons – it attracts people to come to our community to see the arts as we embrace them.”

As baby boomers retire and opt to relocate to downtown, officials look for ways to attract the next generation of workers. Technology allows many of them to work from anywhere, making a downtown live-work environment ideal and appealing. An arts district itself would also create jobs.

In addition, reusing and retrofitting existing buildings and pieces of property is a sustainable way to develop downtowns.

“The population of Fayetteville is growing at a couple of percent per year, and we want to be able to do that, not with sprawl, but by emphasizing what’s already here,” Clark said.

Fifth-year architecture students will work with Community Design Center staff in a studio this fall to begin project design. Final drawings and models will be completed in spring 2014.

Community Design Center Wins Two Awards from Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

Design projects in Kigali and Little Rock recognized

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center recently received national accolades from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture for separate projects focused on housing design education in Arkansas and an international outreach effort in Rwanda.

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

The Community Design Center won a 2012-13 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award for Building Neighborhoods that Build Social and Economic Prosperity: Manual for a Complete Neighborhood. This program was one of four this year to win this award, which honors the best practices in school-based community outreach programs.

This project was a collaboration between the Fay Jones School of Architecture and the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in Rwanda. It involved the effort to construct a 2,000-unit neighborhood that reflects Rwanda’s new national sustainability initiative.

“Involving more than 1½ years now, this is an ongoing effort that has engaged various components of the school,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the center. “The basis of the Fay Jones School submission is a publication for the Housing Ministry of Rwanda that illustrates sequential development tactics for transitioning Kigali’s informal settlements to fully serviced housing and neighborhoods.

The project started in a fall 2011 studio lead by Korydon Smith, formerly with the Fay Jones School, and Peter Rich, an architect from South Africa who was the 2011 John G. Williams Visiting Professor in the Fay Jones School. Several students continued working on the project through independent studies in spring 2012 and through internships at the center in summer 2012. All of that work culminated with the publication of this award-winning manual that offers specific design solutions and housing prototypes for Kigali.

“Only 5 percent of Rwandans have access to credit, so development is driven by a do-it-yourself culture, which, in a rapidly urbanizing country, is particularly chaotic,” Luoni said. “We are hopeful that our partnership with our colleagues in Kigali will result in policy, urban and livability advancements. In the meantime, our students have enjoyed life-changing learning experiences.”

The project team included Luoni, Smith, Rich and Jeffrey Huber, assistant director at the center. Students in the fall studio were Samuel Annabel, Andrew Arkell, Ryan Campbell, Enrique Colcha Chavarrea, Long Dinh, Hanna Ibrahim, Kareem Jack, Tanner Sutton and Ginger Traywick. Arkell and Ibrahim were both Honors College students.

Marlon Blackwell, head of the architecture department in the Fay Jones School, wanted the visiting John G. Williams professor to undertake a project with local or global outreach. He and Rich discussed potential projects centered on present-day issues.

Blackwell said the fifth-year studio should tackle a larger initiative, as students begin their transition from academia to the professional world. In this studio, students worked with real-world design issues and dealt with stakeholders, just as they would in a firm.

Dean Jeff Shannon provided financial support for students to travel to Kigali for the fall 2011 studio, as well as for the development of the publication on the project.

Other team members were project designers at the Community Design Center; staff with Peter Rich Architects in South Africa; Tomá Berlanda and Sierra Bainbridge, faculty members of the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology; Paloma Vera, an architect with Cano|Vera Arquitectura, in Mexico; and students from the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology.

The Community Design Center also won a 2012-13 Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture/American Institute of Architects Housing Design Education Award for the Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood. This award recognizes the importance of good education in housing design to produce architects ready for practice in a wide range of areas and able to be capable leaders and contributors to their communities. The project was one of two this year to win this award.

The Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood project pioneers new urban neighborhood templates for affordable housing in Little Rock. The project team included Luoni, Huber and Cory Amos, project designer at the center.

“Since housing constitutes 70 percent of metropolitan land use, it is imperative that our next generation of designers thoroughly understand housing and its role in creating livable cities,” Luoni said. “The Pettaway proposal is particularly important for its recall of the lost art of composing middle-scale housing between four and 25 units. The ‘missing middle’ – courtyard housing, patio garden housing, mews housing, villa apartments and cottage courts, for instance – is key to reclaiming high-quality and walkable urbanism. Our students understand this, and we are proud of their accomplishment.”

This project has also received other recognition, including a 2013 Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design from the American Institute of Architects and a Grand Award in the “On the Boards” category in the 2012 Residential Architect design awards program.

Winning projects will be featured at the 101st annual meeting of the ACSA, planned for March 21-24 in San Francisco. All award winners will be published in the forthcoming 2012-2013 Architecture Education Awards Book.

More information about the 2012-13 awards is available at Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture website.

Springdale Church, Pocket Housing Win National Honor Awards from AIA

Winning projects by Blackwell firm, Community Design Center

A metal shed transformed into a church in Springdale, Ark., and an affordable pocket housing plan for Little Rock have both earned national 2013 Honor Awards from the American Institute of Architects.

The award-winning works were designed by faculty and staff of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas.

The AIA awards are considered the highest national professional honors to be granted to design projects in architecture, urban design and interior design. Twenty-eight awards were granted this year in the categories of architecture, interior architecture, and regional and urban design, chosen from more than 700 submissions.

The St. Nicholas Antiochian Orthodox Christian Church in Springdale, designed by Fayetteville-based Marlon Blackwell Architect, won an Honor Award for Architecture, one of 11 awarded. This is Blackwell’s second AIA Honor Award.

According to the AIA website, the Honor Awards for Architecture program “recognizes achievements for a broad range of architectural activity to elevate the general quality of architecture practice, establish a standard of excellence against which all architects can measure performance, and inform the public of the breadth and value of architecture practice.”

Blackwell is a Distinguished Professor and head of the architecture department in the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas, as well as an AIA Fellow.

The St. Nicholas project entailed the transformation of an existing metal shop building into a sanctuary and fellowship hall in Springdale. The sky-lit tower pours red light down into the transition between the narthex and the sanctuary, giving worshippers a moment of pause before entering. A narrow cross is suspended on the western side of the tower, backlit by the morning sun, itself a beacon for arriving parishioners. The exterior of the building uses box rib metal panels, common in local industrial buildings, while the interior finishes are kept simple. The church is visible from Interstate 540.

“This transformation of a humble former welding shop into an elegant work of religious architecture is an inspiring example for our profession and especially for small practitioners,” the jury noted. “The project makes the most with the least, displaying deep resource efficiency as an integral part of its design ethos – something more architects should be thinking about and practicing.”

Jury members praised the development of flexible space by creating a maneuverable wall between the worship and fellowship spaces. They also called the ability to maintain the sacredness of the space with strategic use of color and light “inspiring.”

The church has also received other honors, including being named the World’s Best Civic and Community Building by the World Architecture Festival in 2011 and receiving a 2011 American Architecture Award and a 2012 AIA Small Project Award.

An Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design was awarded to “Rock Street Pocket Housing,” a design by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School. It was one of eight awarded. Fifth-year architecture students collaborated with staff on this project. This is the center’s 10th national AIA Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design.

The Regional and Urban Design Honor Awards “recognize distinguished achievements that involve the expanding role of the architect in urban design, regional and city planning, and community development,” according to the AIA website. “The awards identify projects and programs that contribute to the quality of these environments.”

“This is a great integration of inventive architecture and sustainable urbanism into a traditional, low-income fabric. The project does a very interesting and successful job of comingling variations of public and private space,” the jury noted. “By creating variations in the housing typology, building placement on the site and landscape treatments, the development proposal has appeal to multiple household types, creates private and shared space, and it completes the urban context of the neighborhood.”

Jury members said the individual house designs admirably handled the double duty of negotiating fronts to the street and the communal space.

“It is thorough, achievable, and detailed with a fresh design approach that is also supportive of the context,” the jury noted.

This design project was prepared for the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp., and funded by planning grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the city of Little Rock.

Designers took the five adjacent parcels for housing in the Pettaway neighborhood and, rather than placing one home on each parcel, they suggested combining the parcels to create a pocket neighborhood. The move nearly doubled the density, placing nine homes around a shared space that includes a community lawn and playground, community gardens, a shared street and a low-impact development storm water management system.

Affordable pricing for the homes – about $100,000 – comes from standardized dimensions and materials, said Stephen Luoni, director of the center. Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School.

This design also won a Grand Award in the “On the Boards” category in the 2012 Residential Architect design awards program.

In addition, other designers with connections to the Fay Jones School received AIA recognition. Olson Kundig Architects won an Honor Award for Architecture for Art Stable in Seattle and an Honor Award for Interior Architecture for the Charles Smith Wines Tasting Room and World Headquarters in Walla Walla, Wash. Kundig, principal and owner at Olson Kundig Architects in Seattle, was the 2010 John G. Williams Distinguished Visiting Professor for the school.

VJAA won two Honor Awards for Interior Architecture – for the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and Abbey Church Pavilion in Collegeville, Minn., and for Chicago Apartment. Vincent James and Jennifer Yoos, both principals at VJAA in Minneapolis, were the 2012 John G. Williams Distinguished Visiting Professors for the school.

The winning projects in this year’s awards program will be exhibited at the AIA convention in Denver in June and published in Architect magazine, the official magazine of the AIA.