Charter Awards honor infill and contextual planning

The first major juried awards focusing solely on new urbanist design demonstrate the breadth of the trend. No Seasides or Celebrations are to be found among the winners of the first annual Charter Awards, announced by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) in May, 2001. In place of widely publicized new towns, the jury focused mainly on lesser-known infill developments and regional planning efforts. The few “greenfield” projects selected are mostly connected to rail lines or being built within the context of larger smart growth planning efforts. The 15 winners are high-quality, uncontroversial projects that even critics of the New Urbanism can appreciate. They range in scale from two projects covering less than an acre to three regional and statewide plans. CNU also highlighted international projects. The winners included plans in Australia, Italy, and Nicaragua (the rest are located in the US). The Charter Awards recognize projects for how well they fulfill tenets of the Charter of the New Urbanism, a set of design principles for regions, neighborhoods, and individual blocks, streets, and buildings signed in 1996 by 266 charter members of CNU. Although the projects are highly diverse in their scope and methodology, they all support pedestrian-scale, mixed-use communities, enhance the public realm, and preserve green space in cities and regions. These awards were given mostly to architects, but they focus primarily on urban design and planning. The Charter Awards are the first official, juried awards for new urbanist design. Selected from among 208 entries, the winning projects and recipients are: Robert Mueller Municipal Airport Plan Roma Design Group This plan calls for the redevelopment of a 711-acre, publicly owned brownfield site in Austin, Texas, into a new community that exemplifies the city’s goals for smart growth and sustainable development. The development calls for 4,000 homes, 4 million square feet of office space, 350,000 square feet of retail, schools, churches, community centers and parks all within an interconnected network of blocks and streets. “This is a great example of a new neighborhood that is integrated into its surroundings,” says juror Anne Vernez-Moudon. Flaghouse Courts Torti Gallas & Partners • CHK This infill project in Baltimore, Maryland, transforms a socially segregated high-rise public housing complex into a mixed-income and mixed-use neighborhood, reconnecting the site to the historic street grid. The project exemplifies the US Department of Housing and Urban Development Hope VI program, which emphasizes the rehabilitation and redesign of public housing using new urbanist principles. The project will place 338 new homes along with shops and community buildings on 14.5 acres. Civic Vision for Turnpike Air Rights Goody, Clancy and Associates Perhaps the most unusual project selected, it creates a plan for development over the 2-mile long section of the Massachusetts Turnpike placed underground by one of the nation’s largest recent public works undertakings. The 44-acre, 300-foot-wide highway swath divided the center of Boston for many decades. The plan calls for sidewalks lined with shops and active uses connecting city neighborhoods, four to six million square feet of retail, 10 miles of walkways, two acres of new parks, and $2 billion in private investment opportunities. This project is “remarkable for the process,” according to juror Robert Campbell, “in which a very diverse group of stakeholders with radically different perspectives came together, over time, to agree on a document that has been adopted by the city as a template for future development.” Eighth & Pearl Wolff Lyon Architects This 18,200 sq. ft. development of shops, offices, and residential units in Boulder, Colorado, transformed a former gas station into a dense urban block. Adjacent to a historic, zero-setback main street, Eighth & Pearl responds in a contextual manner to building typologies and architecture in the neighborhood. The architects worked with local planners to change the zoning for the site, which called for suburban setbacks and parking requirements. The project is “an important prototype,” according to juror Ray Gindroz. “Putting stores on the commercial street and housing in the rear is the way to organize a block in this kind of setting.” State Street Renovation Skidmore, Owings & Merrill State Street, one of Chicago’s most important historic shopping districts, was turned into a nine-block pedestrian mall in the late 1970s in order to compete with suburban shopping centers. The absence of auto traffic, however, caused further isolation and hastened the street’s decline. Implementation of the plan in 1996 reopened the street to traffic, guided sensitive historic rehabilitation and contextual new construction, provided streetscape improvements, and emphasized marketing and economic development. “The project serves as an example of how a carefully designed infrastructure improvement can catalyze reinvestment in an economically depressed downtown corridor,” comments juror Jonathan Barnett. Managuita Neighborhood Plan Delphi Design and Development This new neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, uses traditional planning and vernacular architecture as an antidote to three decades of suburban sprawl. In 1972, an earthquake destroyed much of the city. Afterwards, foreign experts recommended splitting the city into single use zones clustered around the main traffic arteries. As a result, many residents now live in areas without sidewalks, parks, main streets, or public spaces. This 62-acre plan calls for a mixed-use core surrounded by walkable neighborhoods. “Many people think that the New Urbanism is defined by traditional American building practices,” says jury member Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. “This exploration of a plan based on the Law of the Indies is a viable alternative ... to current development practices” in countries such as Nicaragua. New Jersey State Plan New Jersey Department of Community Affairs The State of New Jersey’s Planning Office “has distinguished itself as the creator of the first (US) state model plan promoting policies and practices consistent with the New Urbanism,” according to CNU. The plan is a unifying framework for a variety of statewide smart growth initiatives. These various policies, funding sources, and codes are intended to foster an environment where implementation of the Charter principles becomes the rule, rather than the exception. “The plan is soil in which great policies can take root,” comments juror Laurie Olin. Johnson Street Townhomes Mithun Partners This small group of infill townhomes is built at 26 units to the acre, and is designed to complement the scale and texture of its surroundings — a historic warehouse district in Portland, Oregon. “This is a refreshing example of handsome, well- detailed modernist architecture in a new urbanist project,” comments Campbell. “The Townhomes project is ingenious in the way it achieves high densities without loss of open space, provided in the form of courtyards.” King Farm Torti Gallas & Partners • CHK This 440-acre, 3,200-unit project is built in the form of five neighborhoods, each defined by the five minute walk radius. The site is adjacent to the last station of the Washington Metro line, and lies at the transfer point between the Metro and a future light rail line — which features prominently in the design. “By creatively involving production homebuilders, the design is being built at an impressive rate,” notes Gindroz. “What’s more, it’s good urbanism.” Envision Utah Calthorpe Associates The Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area has experienced a development boom over the past decade, and is predicted to triple in population by 2050. The Envision Utah plan arose out of leaders’ efforts to educate the public about issues associated with rapid growth in the 700-square-mile region. A major part of this project involved looking at the impact of various development scenarios, from large lot, low density, to compact and walkable. The region’s major newspaper distributed 570,000 copies of these scenarios, along with mail-in surveys. Almost 50 town meetings were held. The modeling showed that strategies oriented around walkable neighborhoods would preserve hundreds of square miles of undeveloped land and billions of dollars in infrastructure costs. As a result, the region now has a collective vision for future growth, giving local governments a clear motivation to develop infill and mass transit. Fonti di Matilde Studio Bontempi European developments are increasingly adopting the single-use, large-lot suburban model so prevalent in the US. This project in San Bartolomeo, Italy, “offers a refreshing departure from that trend” in the form of a village with 60 homes, a hotel, spa, and church, according to CNU. The 138-acre plan also preserves open space. The jurors were impressed with the way that Fonti di Matilde combines new urbanist ideas with Italian vernacular architecture. “Although this project is a resort hotel, it is built as a beautifully scaled town with housing and civic uses,” says Gindroz. Britton Courts Solomon ETC This 92-acre project offers housing to low-income residents of San Francisco, replacing Geneva Towers, once considered one of the city’s most troubled public housing developments. Pedestrian-oriented streets link to the surrounding thoroughfares, and human-scaled, secure eightplexes border shared courtyards. Britton Courts matches the scale of surrounding houses at twice the density, while making no attempt to mimic them stylistically. Plater-Zyberk calls Britton Courts “An achievement deserving recognition for its success, for the quality of architecture and street design, and for its social ambition to reunite a community severed by its predecessor.” Washington Town Cen-ter Open Space Design Brown & Keener Urban Design The planning of this greenfield new town in Washington Township, New Jersey, was sponsored by the municipality. Its town center straddles an existing state highway and the project expands a historic village. The plan also preserves a 450-acre greenbelt edge and surrounding farmland. About 1,000 new homes and 300,000 square feet of commercial space are being built in the form of walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. “This project represents a remarkable public initiative,” says Plater-Zyberk. “It structures the private sector build-out of a new town center for a suburban area.” Townhomes on Capitol Hill Telesis Corporation Many of the 134 units of housing on the 5.3-acre site in Washington, DC, are reserved for low- to moderate-income families. The project’s urban design integrates the units into surrounding urban blocks, and the architecture complements the historic city. The project is notable for its varied facades and unit plans, and wide palette of finishes — all within the context of affordable housing. New streets were created to provide each unit with a front door, and parking is provided both on-street and behind each unit, accessible from alleys. Liveable Neighbor-hoods Statewide Codes Ministry of Planning Western Australia covers a million square miles, but most of the residents live in the rapidly sprawling Perth metropolitan area. During the 1990s, the public and the state government began looking for alternatives to Perth’s low-density, suburban development, high car dependence, and limited access to public transportation. In response, the government developed the Liveable Neighborhoods Code, based on the principles of the New Urbanism and Responsive Environments practices in the United Kingdom. The code was developed through an extensive public process that included design charrettes for the entire Perth region. “An inclusive and holistic process has made this plan one of the most thorough and ambitious new urbanist efforts anywhere in the world,” says juror Harvey Gantt.