The current Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellows share their ideas, inspirations and photos from the field on our blog. Learn more about the Fellowship.
By Sam Carlsen, Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellow
On April 11 and 12, the Saint Paul Design Studio partnered with the Frogtown Neighborhood Association (FNA) and the Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC) to run a two day community charrette on University Avenue in Saint Paul, MN. This community charrette focused on the Northwest corner of University and Dale, which the Neighborhood Development Corporation (NDC) is hoping to redevelop. The purpose of the charrette was to combine local residents’ expertise in their neighborhood conditions and needs with the expertise of local designs in building and program design. The charrette used residents’ and designers combined skills to create and evaluate possible site activities, building placements, sizes and styles.
The intersection of University and Dale is an important historical intersection for the community and a future station for the Central Corridor Light Rail. Two corners at the intersection have already been redeveloped using Transit Oriented Design guiding principles. The northwest corner contains several small commercial buildings, two of which are NDC as business incubator sites.
Gathering information on a site walk
We started our charrette on Wednesday night with a community walk on which we examined existing conditions of alleyways, sidewalks, parking lots and facades for both the old and new buildings. At each stop along the way we considered specific conditions on site or common in the neighborhood. The group of community members, neighborhood leaders, designers and developers, considered questions like “How do we make alleys with homes and businesses work for everyone?” or “What would make row houses fit into the neighborhood better?”, pointing to built examples to make points as often as possible.
After the site walk, we brainstormed important issues and features for the site. After listing the relevant issues we could think of participants ranked issues using dots. These issues were the criteria we used to evaluate our design work with the help of many of the residents who retuned on the second evening.
Residents ranking issue importance on site
The second day started with a team briefing which included an overview from the previous day as well as technical briefings from city planners and stormwater engineers. Choosing from the list of issues identified from the briefing and the previous day a group of designers and local residents sat down and did a series of “design flashes”, quick sketches or phrases on index cards which addressed an issue with a design element. These design flash cards were then the ingredients that groups worked to combine into schemes for the rest of the day.
Design team members creating design flash cards
In the late afternoon the charrette team exhibited the entire process and three site schemes developed by the design teams. The schemes presented three levels of development intensity; from restoration and infill to block scale redevelopment. This charrette took place very early in the development process when the scope, scale and use of the project are still in flux. NDC and FNA both wanted to develop continual of community participation in the development process. With the project on a long timeline, the challenge will now be turning the work and input into a document or tool that will continue to be relevant and useful throughout the process. Hopefully we can present the work in a way that helps maintain the characteristic strengths in addressing the community concerns while allowing future project iterations to freely incorporate elements. Once the summary document is completed, we’ll get a summary posted here on the blog.
Brainstorming issues for design team briefing
