Community Design Center Recognized by Fast Company for Homeless Transition Village

A project by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and its collaborators earned recognition in Fast Company's 2019 Innovation by Design Awards. The "New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village: A Permittable Settlement Pattern" was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Social Good category.

New Beginnings is a transitional housing village in Fayetteville for homeless singles who have insufficient wages and lack access to affordable housing. The complex is designed as a pop-up camp that is compliant with a provisional city permit that only allows temporary structures, providing individuals with an ecologically sustainable stepping stone back to formal housing.

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

"Our village prototype for New Beginnings has allowed us to receive permitting from the city of Fayetteville for a land use and housing type that is otherwise nonconforming in cities," said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. "The prototype also assists other housing providers struggling to establish housing for homeless in city centers where essential services and employment opportunities are located. Currently, similar projects for homeless populations are constructed in unincorporated areas to escape municipal regulations, disconnecting them from community and opportunity."

Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School.

The design for the complex combines individual weatherized sleeping units, a secure perimeter and a 150-foot-long "community porch" for shared services such as cooking, bathing and sanitation facilities. The community porch also provides gathering space and social work offices. The components of the village are designed for disassembly and reuse, avoiding the discard of material in a landfill.

The project was granted a five-year conditional approval by the city of Fayetteville. A formal groundbreaking on the site of a former tent city took place in April 2019. The village is expected to be operational for the coming winter.

Twenty single homeless people will be able to live in the village for six-month terms, receiving both shelter and comprehensive social services. The goal is to support them in stabilizing their lives and transitioning to permanent housing.

New Beginnings was commissioned by Serve Northwest Arkansas, a regional group working to address homelessness and poverty through a shelter-first approach. Kevin Fitzpatrick, University Professor and Jones Chair in Community in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, served as client and programing consultant for the project.

Other team members include Steve L. Marshall, of The Marshall Group of NWA (construction management); John Langham, AIA, LEED AP, of WER Architects/Planners (architect of record); Leslie Tabor (landscape architect); Neal Morrison, PE, of Morrison-Shipley Engineers, Inc. (civil engineer); Richard M. Welcher, P.E., of Tatum-Smith Engineers, Inc. (structural engineer); and Omni Engineers (MEP engineer).

The Innovation by Design Awards honor creative work at the intersection of design, business and innovation. Fast Company editors and writers spend a year researching and reviewing applicants for the annual awards. This year's applicant pool was the most competitive ever, with more than 4,300 entries.

The project will be featured online and in the October issue of Fast Company magazine. The honorees will also be recognized during Fast Company's Innovation Festival in New York, planned for Nov. 4-8. 

Community Design Center and Partners Receive Two 2019 American Architecture Awards

Two projects of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and its partners have been recognized with 2019 American Architecture Awards from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.

One winning project is Greers Ferry Water Garden, a conceptual design created by the center in collaboration with Marlon Blackwell Architects and the Ecological Design Group. The other is the Center for Farm and Food System Entrepreneurship, a project designed for the U of A Division of Agriculture.

These are the 11th and 12th Community Design Center projects to receive American Architecture Awards. The center is an outreach program of Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design.

"We are pleased that these combined landscape and architectural complexes — both for the state of Arkansas — are receiving recognition," said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. "They serve important public interests for the state."

Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School. Blackwell is a Distinguished Professor and the E. Fay Jones Chair in Architecture in the school.

Greers Ferry Water Garden at Greers Ferry Dam in Heber Springs updates and completes a plan conceived in the 1960s by Edward Durell Stone, a native of Arkansas and an internationally renowned mid-century architect.

Present-day designers updated Stone's ornamental landscape to support a natural fish hatchery, wetlands, edible landscapes, an improved riparian system, irrigated vertical gardens, wet meadows and a pond ecosystem to showcase niche plant communities and wildlife.

Water from the dam is circulated throughout the site in micro-loops, enhancing nutrient exchange, metabolic cycles and life in this whole-system watershed approach.

"We refreshed Stone's design with greater emphasis on ecological considerations, including a place-based expression of the Ozark landscape toward a more contemporary visitor-centered approach," Luoni said.

The garden combines botanical features with facilities for both the performing arts and installation sites for large-scale public art.

This design has received numerous design awards since its completion in 2017. The project received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the state of Arkansas and the Entergy Foundation.

The second project, the Center for Farm and Food System Entrepreneurship, is a training center for future farmers near the U of A campus in Fayetteville. The center models new concepts and technologies in farming — from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses to machine repair, marketing, business planning, value-added food innovation and cooking.

Members of the Community Design Center, the Fay Jones School and the Dale Bumpers College of Agricultural, Food and Life Sciences served on the project team.

"The center articulates the farm as a next-generation civic infrastructure central to community well-being," Luoni said. "The center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products."

Entry to the complex is layered through successive landscapes, beginning with parking gardens in an orchard and continuing through a tractor garage/shop and greenhouses. These portals open to the central barnyard that frames the formal training loft at the edge of the fields.

The training loft extends the heavy timber traditions in barn technology through the use of contemporary sustainable timber construction. The structure is engineered from glue-laminated timber and cross-laminated timber, materials that comprise the cutting edge of wood design.

The open timber structure filled with glass provides a sense of warmth and intimacy within the barnyard, while its opposite edge presents a cladded surface to Garland Avenue east of the farm.

The American Architecture Awards program, started 25 years ago, is a centerpiece of the Chicago Athenaeum and the European Centre's efforts to identify and promote best practices in all types of architectural development and to bring a global focus to the best new designs from the United States. It is the only national and global program of its kind.

Winning projects may be viewed at The Chicago Athenaeum or The American Architecture Awards. 

U of A Community Design Center's Hawaii Project Shortlisted for 2019 World Architecture Festival

A project of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and its partners has been shortlisted in the 2019 World Architecture Festival awards program.

The Wahiawa Value-Added Product Development Center in Wahiawa, Hawaii, is one of 16 projects listed for consideration in the Future Projects-Education category. The Community Design Center created the project with the U of A Resiliency Center and Urban Works Inc., an architectural firm in Honolulu, Hawaii.

The Community Design Center and the Resiliency Center are outreach programs of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the U of A.

The shortlisted project repurposes an existing metal warehouse in downtown Wahiawa as a value-added product development center or food maker space for the state community college system.

"Value-added" is a business term referring to any process that enhances the services or features delivered by a raw material. Examples from the USDA include turning fruit into jam, processing food organically or shipping food in a way that enhances its value for producers.

The development center will support postsecondary education in the incubation, marketing and commercialization of value-added food products from the creative reuse of local agricultural waste streams. Production processes will include baking, juicing, fermentation/pickling, distillation for alcoholic beverages, development of food-grade cosmetics and packaging.

"This new maker space for students entails parallel development of a curriculum that combines food science and design," said Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. "The goal is to commercialize production processes and knowledge transfers in the creation of new markets through applied learning and design."

Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies in the Fay Jones School.

The center is part of an island-wide portfolio of cooperative food hubs and facilities being developed by the Hawaii Department of Agriculture to support the development of local food supply chains. Hawaii imports more than 93 percent of its food despite being the most remote occupied landmass on Earth, Luoni said.

The development center repurposes a windowless warehouse space into a vertically integrated food maker space that highlights the role of production. There is also gallery space for public exhibition and tasting of final products on Wahiawa's main street.

Designers carved courtyards into the big box, introducing natural light and landscape spaces. The design also re-clads the downtown building with new public frontages and roof monitors.

The development center is a joint venture of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture/Agribusiness Development Corporation and the University of Hawaii Community Colleges system.

The project will be presented before an international jury at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam in December. Some 534 shortlisted projects from 70 countries will be featured in 33 design categories.

The World Architecture Festival is a leading global design awards program in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture. Previous Community Design Center projects shortlisted at the annual festival include the Whitmore Community Food Hub Complex, Greers Ferry Water Garden, the Little Rock Creative Corridor and Fayetteville 2030: Transit City Scenario Plan. 

Director, Professor Stephen Luoni to Present 'Reinventing the Commons' Lecture on Sept. 9

Stephen Luoni will present a lecture at 4 p.m. Monday, Sept. 9, in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design lecture series.

Luoni is the director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center. He is also the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies and a Distinguished Professor of architecture in the Fay Jones School. 

During his lecture, "Reinventing the Commons," Luoni will develop an overall approach to public-interest design and its role in producing public goods — the very definition of what it means to be a profession. He will focus on formulation of the placemaking platforms and design projects demonstrating these platforms.

Architects are asked to solve for complex public-interest problems, or "wicked problems," with many variables of challenges characterized by social complexity. The development of approaches with many scales as well as formal vocabularies are intrinsic to addressing this class of design problems.

The U of A Community Design Center is an outreach center of the Fay Jones School, with work that specializes in interdisciplinary public-interest design, combining ecological, urban and architectural design. As a teaching office with professional staff, it has developed the building blocks for a new ecology of the city. This repertoire of placemaking platforms triangulates public policy, best practices and design in the areas of agricultural urbanism, missing middle-scale housing, context-sensitive street design, transit-oriented development, watershed urbanism and ecologically-based urban stormwater management.

The Community Design Center is one of a few university-based teaching offices in the United States dedicated to delivering urban design work. The center's focus on expansive problem-solving through new design tools and pattern languages address the public good and the role of community design centers in addressing the grand challenges that enlarge the design professions.

Under his direction since 2003, the center's work has received more than 150 awards for urban design, research and education, including Progressive Architecture Awards, American Institute of Architects Honors Awards for Regional and Urban Design, Charter Awards from the Congress for the New Urbanism, American Society of Landscape Architecture Awards, Environmental Design Research Association Awards, American Architecture Awards and the international LafargeHolcim Awards.

Luoni directed production of the center's books: Houses for Aging Socially, Conway Urban Watershed Framework Plan and Low Impact Development: A Design Manual for Urban Areas, which has been translated into Chinese.

His work has been published in Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Architect, Places Journal and international journals. He was named a 2012 United States Artists Ford Fellow.

Luoni received a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The Ohio State University and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.

The school is pursuing continuing education credits for this lecture through the American Institute of Architects and the American Society of Landscape Architects.

The public is invited to attend. Admission is free, with limited seating.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or fayjones.uark.edu. 

U of A Community Design Center Garners Several Honors in International PLAN Competition

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center and its collaborators have received recognition for several projects in The PLAN Awards 2019, an international design awards program sponsored by The Plan magazine.

The Greers Ferry Water Garden master plan, designed by the center with Marlon Blackwell Architects and Ecological Design Group, won the Landscape category for future projects.

Three other center projects were finalists in the Urban Planning category for future projects: the Whitmore Community Food Hub Complex in Hawaii, designed in collaboration with the U of A Resiliency Center; the New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village commissioned by Serve Northwest Arkansas; and The Wharf at Pine Bluff for Go Forward Pine Bluff.

The awards program highlights projects in urban design and planning, landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, product design and transportation engineering. Winners and finalists in 21 categories were chosen from more than 750 submissions in the 2019 competition.

"Our center's mission to promote creative development of place through combined research, design and education solutions is a niche approach in urban and community design and is being recognized as such," said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. "Because of our institutional strengths and partners, we can formulate robust design solutions addressing health, resiliency and equity in shaping cities. We are on par with some of global design industry's largest firms in addressing challenges in the built environment."  

Luoni is also a Distinguished Professor and the Steven L. Anderson Chair in Architecture and Urban Studies at the university.

"Greers Ferry Water Garden" updates and completes a project conceived in the 1960s by Edward Durell Stone, an internationally renowned architect and a native of Arkansas. Stone designed a public water garden at Greers Ferry Dam in Heber Springs, drawing on ancient Roman and Persian hydraulics for inspiration.

The Community Design Center and its collaborators refreshed Stone's design with greater ecological considerations and a contemporary visitor-centered approach. They shifted Stone's reliance on classical models to include terrain that reflects the Arkansas Ozarks. The plan pairs the dam as hard infrastructure and the water garden as soft infrastructure, offering a new environmental model for park design.

Water captured by the dam is recycled through the 269-acre water garden to grow new life and create higher-order niche ecologies. Such complex transformations are the key to building sustainable and resilient communities, Luoni said. The project received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the state of Arkansas and the Entergy Foundation.

"Whitmore Community Food Complex: Building Community Around Food" was commissioned by the state of Hawaii to address the problems of food production, processing and distribution on the island chain. The project revolves around a community-based food hub on a former Dole plantation on Oahu. The food hub connects local growers with wholesale consumers while also serving as a cultural destination, connecting visitors with the island's agricultural legacies.

The master plan calls for agricultural workforce housing, local business incubation, retail outlets and cultural tourism, along with the logistics needed to run the food hub. A public concourse features a wetland garden, a demonstration taro garden and a food forest based on permaculture farming principles. The concourse and bridge connect the complex to the nearby town of Wahiawa across a 300-foot ravine.

The project was funded by the Agribusiness Development Corporation of the Hawaii Department of Agriculture.

"New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village: A Permittable Settlement Pattern" provides a prototype for a shelter-first response to the problem of homelessness. The project reconciles gaps between informal building practices and formal regulations, making interim solutions ecologically sustainable and able to be permitted under city codes.

The design combines individual weatherized sleeping units, a secure perimeter and a 150-foot-long "community porch" for shared services such as cooking, bathing, sanitation, gathering space and social work offices. The components of the village are designed for disassembly and reuse, avoiding the discard of material in a landfill. On-site construction is limited to wet assembly and site preparation for water supply, waste disposal, foundations and stormwater management. 

The project was granted a five-year conditional approval by the city of Fayetteville, with a formal groundbreaking on the site of a former tent city on April 12.

"The Wharf at Pine Bluff: Re-Stitching City and Water" reconnects downtown Pine Bluff to its lakefront area through a bridge and wharf complex that integrates existing infrastructure with interconnected loops to eliminate the conventional cul-de-sac experience of piers. New attractions include a floating lawn, a boathouse, a beach with kayak and paddleboat launch, a boardwalk, several pavilions for retail and food vendors, and a Ferris wheel.

The project is part of a larger effort to revitalize the city by reinvesting in its downtown through the development of attainable housing and allied public works projects. This will support the renewal of an urban living option in the Arkansas Delta, Luoni said.