STUDIO 630
El Dorado brings Socially and Environmentally Sustainable Echo Ridge Community to Topeka, Kansas
Echo Ridge in Topeka, Kansas is an innovative and sustainable community-based affordable housing project by El Dorado, Inc. El Dorado was hired by the Topeka Housing Authority to create two sustainably designed duplexes and a community center under a tight budget to receive tax credits. They came up with a stellar set of buildings that won several AIA awards and Residential Architect Design Awards in 2012.
Boulevard Brewing Company Cellar 1 Expansion / el dorado
Boulevard Brewing Company desired a fast-track process for design and construction for an expansion project that would add (8) 40’-0” tall tanks to a 15’-0” tall existing structure. The tanks, planned for the production of hops beer, needed to be accessed 24 hours a day to regulate the addition of ingredients. BBC selected a project team assembled by an architect-led design-build delivery process to execute a complex assembly of components within very tight quarters. From the onset of the design process, the architect-builder had to plan the project to allow all adjacent space to remain open throughout construction.
During Schematic Design, the architect-builder discovered an underground river within a 1920’s culvert running under the north corner of the existing structure. The architect embraced this constraint, allowing historic infrastructure to shape the new expansion into a dynamic form that directly engages a busy intersection emerging from a nearby train overpass. The Cellar One Expansion serves dual functions. It provides a functionally sound, naturally illuminated space for the new tanks. The expansion also rises as a celebrated light monitor, providing natural illumination to existing adjacent brewing space below. Careful placement of perforated screening eliminates unwanted heat gain from the brewing process.
SEEDocs: Bancroft School Revitalization
Design Corps and SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design) have released the latest installment of SEEDocs, their series of awesome, mini-documentaries that highlight inspirational stories of award-winning public interest design projects.
While June’s doc featured an incredible community garden in New Orleans, designed/built with help from the Tulane School of Architecture’s Tulane City Center, this month focuses on the revitalization of an abandoned, abestos-ridden school in Manheim Park, a low-income, neglected neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri.
Hoping to revitalize their neighborhood, Manheim Park residents approached BNIM Architects with the idea of turning a derelict, boarded-up school into a revitalized community center that would encourage community engagement. With the help of the Make It Right Foundation, BNIM collaborated with the neighborhood residents to design a multi-use center that will feature affordable housing units, a health clinic, and public gathering space.
The approach, which integrated the local community into the process from the start, epitomizes the SEED Network’s mantra: “trust the local.” The result, in the words of Saundra Hayes, the President of the Historic Manheim Park Neighborhood Association, was empowering for the architects and the community as a whole: “This project has uplifted humanity […not by] inducing dependence but creating empowerment – and that’s powerful.”
More Info at SEEDocs
Sprint Center is one of my favorite arenas or stadiums - if you’ve never been, try to go. It’s a great combination of design, technology and planning that bring sports and entertainment to the urban life of a wonderful Midwest city. They aren’t lying - everything really is up-to-date in Kansas City.
via urbanresolve:
Presented the following at the Kansas City Parking and Transportation Commission. Key message: “We transformed one block for one day; Our streets could be like this every day; We need your help to make our streets better.”
via betterblockkc:
Our friend photographer Mike Sinclair was at better block, and has shared his photos of the event with us!
via betterblockkc:
Great event! It was amazing to see how such an intervention could change the city.
Better Block KC Photos
via betterblockkc:
Come enjoy the following music and art at Better Block KC!
via betterblockkc:
Site plan for Better Block KC. We will temporarily transform this block of Grand Boulevard into a complete street.
via betterblockkc:
We are amazed by how this grassroots project has taken off! So many organizations and individuals have offered to help! Here are the highlights:
- The neighbor.ly page is up. Please help! http://neighbor.ly/betterblockkc.
- We have secured a traffic control company to rent signs, cones,…
From Greater Greater Washington:
The central fact about cars, from a planner’s perspective, is that they take up space. Lots of space. And this matters because space in cities (a.k.a real estate) is scarce and therefore expensive.
Cars take up space when they’re moving and they take up space when they’re parked, and even though they can’t be simultaneously moving and parked, you have to plan for both states and plan for peak demand; so you have to set aside some multiple of the real estate actually occupied by the car at any given time.
That’s just a practical observation about the spatial geometry of cities that doesn’t bow to my ideology or yours. And it would still remain true even if cars ran on nothing but recycled newspapers and emitted nothing but rainbows and unicorn tears.
In the past, our policy response has been to just set aside more and more space for cars: More freeways, more roads, more lanes on existing roads, more parking garages and surface lots. This approach hasn’t worked, and there are two very practical reasons why:
First, you can never build enough. There’s a phenomenon called “induced demand” that is very well understood by now. A new lane or a new freeway never reduces congestion in the long run: People respond to new capacity by driving more or by living or working in previously remote places, and you’re very quickly back where you started and have to build still more. The same phenomenon applies to increases in the supply of parking. It’s a game you can’t win.
Second, when you do make more space for cars you quickly start to crowd out any other potential mode of transportation, especially walking. All those parking lots and freeways and roads spread everything else out so that the distances become too great for walking. And the more you optimize any given space for cars the more hostile that space is for pedestrians. Very quickly you get to the point where it becomes impossible—or prohibitively depressing—to get things done on foot.
And this last fact has huge quality-of-life implications for human beings—not just because driving to a distant strip mall for a gallon of milk is less pleasant than walking to a corner store, but also because for many people driving simply isn’t an option.
Check out the rest of the article here.
(Infographic source: Muenster Planning Office)
Kansas City Residents Build Their Bike Share Scheme
One would not expect to find a bike share program in a car dominated metropolis like Kansas City, which has the highest ratio of highway lane miles to city population in the United States. A city that has a large number of highway miles can often lead to adverse health problems like obesity and diabetes. To top it all off Kansas City also has the lowest bike and transit ridership use in the nation as well, despite having one of the largest bike and nature trail networks in the country.
BikeWalkKC, the regional bike advocacy group, is hoping to change the perception of car-dominated Kansas City to a healthier alternative of biking and public transportation. The group has a bold vision to have 75% of the city’s residents living within bike/walk friendly areas by the year 2020. This vision will be accomplished through a combination of biking policies, public education, and research for future growth of bike networks. The group’s regional efforts can be seen with the downtown metropolitan area enacting a number of complete street proposals and encouraging neighboring cities to implement bike friendly policies for future street improvements.
Kansas City’s next infrastructural project will be to implement a Bike Share program across the city in conjunction with the future streetscape improvements. BikeWalkKC will run the bike share system and organized the bike build at donated warehouse space. Having the bike build will allow for both an enthusiastic public to actively invest in a future transportation system for their city and reduce costs for the assembly of the new bikes.
With over seventy-five volunteers in two events, the Bike Build is well under way to build the ninety new bicycles for Kansas City’s B-Cycle program. Like an ant colony, BikeWalkKC strategically divided the vast number of volunteers into various stations based on their skill level. The general public can be amazing dedicated volunteers and quickly put to task the unpacking of ninety disassembled bikes onto the fabrication line. Once the last box was unpacked, various group leaders quickly integrated these volunteers into their part of the process to help foster further education.
The next step of the assembly line was putting the various pieces of the bike such as the bike seat and basket onto the bike. Keeping with the spirit of sharing, BikeWalkKC developed a smart sharing system of the tools for the bike build that allowed quick transfers between groups. As the various components came together, another group concentrated on the fine tuning of the bikes to ensure that a high-quality bike was entering the new bike share program.
The most complicated and important piece of equipment is the embedded GPS locator for the bike. Each bike’s unique key is linked to a GPS locator which tracks the bike’s location throughout the city. This will allow BikeWalkKC to track where to service more bicycles and give insight into where more bicycle kiosks can be set up for future use.
With special support from local businesses Boulevard Brewery and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City, the Bike Build was a huge success for starting a new biking culture in Kansas City. The bikes will be ready for city-wide use on July 3, 2102 following the All-Star Baseball Series. The launch party will deliver get the bicycles to their docking stations ranging from the north River Market District to the south downtown areas of Union Station and Crown Center.
By Kyle Rogler, Studio 630
Via ThisBigCity
Rethinking the Strip Mall
El dorado headed up a workshop on rethinking that much-maligned fixture of 20th century American architecture– the strip mall. Dan Maginn and Josh Shelton presented three case studies, three unique projects that represent a broad array of public, private, and cultural entities facing the issue head on.
First, the Johnson County Justice Center, an all-encompassing conversion of a former Dillon’s grocery store.
Next, FLEX Storage Systems, an award-winning renovation of an aging Topeka strip mall.
Finally, “A Benevolent Con,” el dorado’s invited entry for the Flip–a–Strip Competition at the Scottsdale, Arizona Museum of Art.
![“Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback
Gritty Rust Belt cities, once left for dead, are on the rise — thanks to young people priced out of cooler locales.
By Will Doig. SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 12:00 PM EDT
More than any other city in America, Cleveland is a joke, a whipping boy of Johnny Carson monologues and Hollywood’s official set forfilms about comic mediocrity.
But here’s what else is funny: According to a recent analysis, the population of downtown Cleveland is surging, doubling in the past 20 years. What’s more, the majority of the growth occurred in the 22-to-34-year-old demo, those coveted “knowledge economy” workers for whom every city is competing. Pittsburgh, too, has unexpectedly reversed its out-migration of young people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds was declining there until 2000, but has since climbed by 16 percent. St. Louis attracted more young people than it lost in each of the past three years. And as a mountain of “Viva Detroit!” news stories have made clear, Motor City is now the official cool-kids destination, adding thousands of young artists, entrepreneurs and urban farmers even as its general population evaporates.
It’s a surprising demographic shift that has some in the Rust Belt wondering if these cities should trumpet their gritty, hardscrabble personas, rather than try to pretend that they’re just like Chicago or Brooklyn, N.Y., but cheaper. Detroit has certainly proven that a city’s hard knocks can be marketed, from “ruin porn” coffee table books to award-winning Chrysler ads to “Detroit Hustles Harder”hoodies. Could other Midwestern cities go all-in on their own up-by-your-bootstraps appeal? “I think there’s a backlash in the American psyche that’s longing for that,” says Cleveland native Richey Piiparinen. “Look at Miami. We’ve learned that all that glitters isn’t gold.”
Piiparinen recently referenced this trend as “Rust Belt chic” in a post on the blog Rust Wire, describing its allure as “the warmth of the faded, and the edge in old iron and steel … part old-world, working culture, like the simple pleasures associated with bagged lunchmeat and beaten boots in the corner. And then there is grit, one of the main genes in the DNA of American coolness.”
Demand for decay could spell a new era for post-industrial cities — or run its course as a faddish blip that attracted more media coverage than actual converts. Piiparinen believes the shift could last, as more and more people find themselves not just priced out, but burnt out by increasingly tidy, boutiquey cities like New York and Seattle. “The country in the 2000s, it became about growth, glamour, living beyond your means,” he says. “It was all aspiration. Now we’re comparing the foreclosed glass condo tower to the old brick building that’s stood for a hundred years.”
But Rust Belt chic is at least partly a romantic fantasy, and that makes it a risky way to try to revitalize. Last year, Guernica magazine ran a withering critique of what it called “Detroitism,” the fetish for crumbling urban landscapes mixed with eccentric utopian delusions, “where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can have the $100 house and community garden of their dreams.” What these dreams seldom include, however, are the almost unimaginable systemic problems many of these cities suffer from: failed schools, violent crime, the threat of municipal bankruptcy. Photographers parachuting in to shoot Michigan Central Station and Anthony Bourdain’s gushing endorsement may be clouding the fact that cities in crisis won’t be lifted by chicness alone.
What struggling cities need are jobs, and not just jobs at coffee roasteries in abandoned railroad terminals that make for great style-section articles. “The only way [a turnaround] will really happen is by reintroducing meaningful, equitably compensated work into these cities,” says Catherine Tumber, author of “Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.” “This longing can be expressed aesthetically, but it can only be satisfied by restoring the workforce.”
That kind of pragmatic attitude defines Jim Cossler’s approach. The CEO of the Youngstown Business Incubator in Youngstown, Ohio, Cossler wants one distinctly non-gritty thing for his city: software companies. “We don’t want to take any other company,” he says, because software firms are cheap to start up, their location is irrelevant, and they either succeed or fail quickly.”
Via: Salon & massurban:
Photo: StonePhotos via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m487btnqh01qm7ffpo1_500.jpg)
“Rust Belt chic: Declining Midwest cities make a comeback
Gritty Rust Belt cities, once left for dead, are on the rise — thanks to young people priced out of cooler locales.
By Will Doig. SATURDAY, MAY 12, 2012 12:00 PM EDT
More than any other city in America, Cleveland is a joke, a whipping boy of Johnny Carson monologues and Hollywood’s official set forfilms about comic mediocrity.
But here’s what else is funny: According to a recent analysis, the population of downtown Cleveland is surging, doubling in the past 20 years. What’s more, the majority of the growth occurred in the 22-to-34-year-old demo, those coveted “knowledge economy” workers for whom every city is competing. Pittsburgh, too, has unexpectedly reversed its out-migration of young people. The number of 18-to-24-year-olds was declining there until 2000, but has since climbed by 16 percent. St. Louis attracted more young people than it lost in each of the past three years. And as a mountain of “Viva Detroit!” news stories have made clear, Motor City is now the official cool-kids destination, adding thousands of young artists, entrepreneurs and urban farmers even as its general population evaporates.
It’s a surprising demographic shift that has some in the Rust Belt wondering if these cities should trumpet their gritty, hardscrabble personas, rather than try to pretend that they’re just like Chicago or Brooklyn, N.Y., but cheaper. Detroit has certainly proven that a city’s hard knocks can be marketed, from “ruin porn” coffee table books to award-winning Chrysler ads to “Detroit Hustles Harder”hoodies. Could other Midwestern cities go all-in on their own up-by-your-bootstraps appeal? “I think there’s a backlash in the American psyche that’s longing for that,” says Cleveland native Richey Piiparinen. “Look at Miami. We’ve learned that all that glitters isn’t gold.”
Piiparinen recently referenced this trend as “Rust Belt chic” in a post on the blog Rust Wire, describing its allure as “the warmth of the faded, and the edge in old iron and steel … part old-world, working culture, like the simple pleasures associated with bagged lunchmeat and beaten boots in the corner. And then there is grit, one of the main genes in the DNA of American coolness.”
Demand for decay could spell a new era for post-industrial cities — or run its course as a faddish blip that attracted more media coverage than actual converts. Piiparinen believes the shift could last, as more and more people find themselves not just priced out, but burnt out by increasingly tidy, boutiquey cities like New York and Seattle. “The country in the 2000s, it became about growth, glamour, living beyond your means,” he says. “It was all aspiration. Now we’re comparing the foreclosed glass condo tower to the old brick building that’s stood for a hundred years.”
But Rust Belt chic is at least partly a romantic fantasy, and that makes it a risky way to try to revitalize. Last year, Guernica magazine ran a withering critique of what it called “Detroitism,” the fetish for crumbling urban landscapes mixed with eccentric utopian delusions, “where bohemians from expensive coastal cities can have the $100 house and community garden of their dreams.” What these dreams seldom include, however, are the almost unimaginable systemic problems many of these cities suffer from: failed schools, violent crime, the threat of municipal bankruptcy. Photographers parachuting in to shoot Michigan Central Station and Anthony Bourdain’s gushing endorsement may be clouding the fact that cities in crisis won’t be lifted by chicness alone.
What struggling cities need are jobs, and not just jobs at coffee roasteries in abandoned railroad terminals that make for great style-section articles. “The only way [a turnaround] will really happen is by reintroducing meaningful, equitably compensated work into these cities,” says Catherine Tumber, author of “Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America’s Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World.” “This longing can be expressed aesthetically, but it can only be satisfied by restoring the workforce.”
That kind of pragmatic attitude defines Jim Cossler’s approach. The CEO of the Youngstown Business Incubator in Youngstown, Ohio, Cossler wants one distinctly non-gritty thing for his city: software companies. “We don’t want to take any other company,” he says, because software firms are cheap to start up, their location is irrelevant, and they either succeed or fail quickly.”
Via: Salon & massurban:
Photo: StonePhotos via Shutterstock/Salon/Benjamin Wheelock
