A vision of towers for Memphis medical institutions

magine driving into Memphis and finding a medical district whose skyline consists of one romantic tower after another — Tennessee’s response to the medieval Italian town. Imagine walking the streets of the medical district and finding them not bleak or scorching but pleasurable — lined by shade trees, ornamental fences, distinctive gates, and buildings that enhance public life.
    Those are some of the ideas that emerged from a week-long charrette organized by the University of Miami’s Knight Fellows in Community Building and its School of Architecture. Rusty Bloodworth, a Knight Fellow who is a developer with Boyle Investment Company in Memphis, proposed the charrette and helped bring it in July to a mile-square area called “Intown.”
    The area — described by local journalist Mary Cashiola as a district lacking an identity — includes pawn shops, rundown buildings, and vacant lots but also contains the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, Le Bonheur Children’s Medical Center, University of Tennessee School of Medicine, and other medical or health-related institutions. One of the chief opportunities lies in getting the medical institutions to form a cohesive network of pedestrian-friendly streets and buildings.
    Miami architecture professor Joanna Lombard encouraged institutions to think of creating a striking silhouette, one made up of slim towers reminiscent of those built from the eleventh to the thirteenth century in the Tuscan hill town San Gigmignano. “The towers address the need for each institution to project its own architectural identity, distinctive to its own history, context, and mission,” Lombard explained to New Urban News. People driving toward them from the airport or from throughout the region would gain a sense of orientation.
    “There are 14 institutions that might want to build towers,” Lombard said. The  distance between the two institutions at the outermost edge of the district is about a mile, so the horizon could present a “family of towers,” each tower embodying as much individuality as desired, yet compatible with the others, since all would share similar proportions, Lombard said.
    Medical districts in American cities rarely offer a friendly, coherent atmosphere at ground-level and a lively yet unified image in the air. Memphis could set an example, Lombard said, by capitalizing on towers’ anthropomorphic character. “They are like sentinels watching over the community,” she said, “steadfast beacons, just the message one hopes to find in the care-givers!”
The slender structures might function as cell towers. “Verizon was building steeples for churches a while back,” she noted. “And it could be that one or two large ones could be observation points, but they work best if the towers are carefully scaled and don’t turn into programmed buildings.” Some would be “at key locations — corners, at the end of a major avenue, etc. — or atop a new building,” she said. The idea draws from ancient Italian towns and also from Seaside, Florida, where towers have  sprouted from houses during the community’s first quarter-century of development. Seaside homeowners have been allowed to build towers as tall as they like, as long as the floor area is, at most, not much more than 200 square feet.
Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, dean of the Miami architecture school, led the charrette, which defined three walkable neighborhoods in the medical center and showed how each could have a main street and grid providing district-wide connectivity. Medical and community facilities would be encouraged to provide pedestrian-engaging edges with fences, gates, liner buildings, and buildings accessible from the sidewalk.
Other recommendations included:
• Reorienting the overall area into six clear neighborhoods, each with its own center.
• Refashioning two principal arterial roads into “grand avenues,” but in a cost-effective manner.
• Establishing a community development corporation for the area and including key medical providers in its operation.
• Using a form-based code to define areas critical for placemaking.
•  Transforming existing parks into safe open space by getting “eyes on the street.”
•  Assuring that existing low-income homeowners are not displaced as mixed-income housing is introduced.
•  Allowing restaurants, groceries, live-work, and multiple-use buildings where they are appropriate, by embedding zoning proposals in a new unified development code or encouraging the city to rezone in accordance with the Uptown code. Uptown is a section of Memphis where Henry Turley, a new urbanist developer best known for building Harbor Town, is active.
•  Having the police, code enforcement, and land use departments work together to eradicate dangerous activities and crack down on threatening structures.
    Carissa Hussong, executive of the UrbanArt Commission, which hosted the charrette, said the focus now is on producing a post-charrette newspaper about the recommendations; presenting the ideas to the mayors of both Memphis and Shelby County; and forming a more official committee authorized to pursue the ideas. The committee will probably include government officials and representatives of medical facilities, property owners, and the community. A number of institutions are looking to expand, and approximately 9,000 jobs are expected to be created in a research park just outside the study area, so Hussong thinks some of the charrette’s ideas stand a good chance of being implemented.