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Beyond
the Building
Working with communities across Connecticut, architecture students
in the Urban Design Workshop learn that social, political, and economic
considerations are just as important as aesthetics.
April
2003
by Jennifer Kaylin
Jennifer
Kaylin is a freelance writer in New Haven. She wrote about the Center
for British Art's new director, Amy Meyers, in our February issue.
On a
blustery Monday morning in May 2001, workers at Latex Foam Products Inc., a company that manufactures
pillows and mattresses in Ansonia, Connecticut, noticed a fire in
an oven used to dry the mattresses. Firefighters quickly doused
the blaze, but no sooner had they piled up their hoses than they
were called back to fight another fire that had been spotted on
the roof. Within minutes, an inferno had erupted that sent flames
shooting hundreds of feet into the air.
Fire companies from
Ansonia and 12 surrounding towns battled the conflagration for five
hours. When it was finally extinguished, the 10-acre factory complex
was destroyed, 265 people were out of work, and the fate of the
city's second largest taxpayer was in grave doubt.
Mayor James Della Volpe
tried desperately to keep Latex Foam in town, but in the end the
owners decided to move to neighboring Shelton, which already had
a building in move-in condition. "We put a lot of time and effort
into keeping them here," Della Volpe says. "When the final decision
came, I was very disheartened."
Della Volpe had a lot
to be disheartened about. Latex Foam served as the southern gateway
to a downtown whose glory days were long gone, even before the factory
burned down. Add to that a severely eroded industrial base and an
unemployment rate well above the state average, and the mayor knew
it would take a lot more than seasonal banners and pots of geraniums
to turn his city around.
William Purcell, president
of the Greater Valley Chamber of Commerce, was equally concerned.
Then he remembered a conversation he'd had about a group at Yale
called the Urban Design Workshop, and he decided to make a call.
"We were under a lot
of pressure to get something in there fast," says Purcell, "but
we didn't want to rush into anything. We saw this as an opportunity
to step back and see the big picture." As it turns out, that is
the UDW's specialty. Composed of students and faculty from the Yale
School of Architecture, the UDW helps cities and towns solve their
urban design problems, often in collaboration with the School of
Management, the law school, and other Yale professional schools.
The
group was founded in 1993, when Alan Plattus, associate dean
of the School of Architecture and co-director of the program, was
asked to advise residents in the small industrial town of Winsted,
Connecticut, on ways to revitalize their downtown. "That experience
consolidated an idea in me that we needed a more permanent vehicle
for urban design, particularly considering Yale's commitment to
do more in New Haven," he says.
The timing was right.
At both Yale and in Washington, there was tremendous support for
urban development, Plattus says. In 1995, Yale received a $2.4 million
HUD grant that enabled the UDW to focus on the Dwight Street neighborhood,
adjacent to the campus.
The UDW, a quasi-independent
firm operating out of a storefront on Chapel Street, charges communities
modest fees for its services and does much work pro bono. Since
its inception, it has developed projects around the state, including
a streetscape beautification plan for Madison, a revitalization
blueprint for a commercial strip in Hartford, highway underpass
murals in East Lyme, and a major campus survey for Yale.
"Usually communities
organize around something adversarial: drugs being sold on a street
corner, prostitution, siting a group home for sex offenders," Plattus
says. "We try to go in and say, 'What's good about this place? What
do you want?'"
That's the hallmark
of the UDW: asking, not telling. "We're very good listeners," says
Michael Haverland, the UDW's other co-director. "We see ourselves
as partners with the people in the community we're working with.
We take the time to get to know them."
This may seem obvious,
but it's not how it was always done. For many years, residents were
simply told to stand aside and make way for the bulldozers. "Some
really ugly architecture and brutal plans that destroyed neighborhoods
were foisted on people," Plattus says, "but eventually residents
fought back, and architects and planners began to think it was appropriate
to engage, rather than just dictate to local communities."
At
the heart of the UDW method is an event called a charrette, a three- or four-day workshop where all the gathered data, research,
and community input is synthesized and presented to the people who
will live with the plan that is ultimately selected. The term originated
with a ritual at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris at the close
of the 19th century. Students would place their entries for competition
on a small cart, or charrette, and hop on board, feverishly putting
the finishing touches on their pieces before the cart reached the
exhibition hall. Since then, the term has come to mean work produced
under extreme time pressure.
"It's about shared
authority," says Haverland. "While we bring technical expertise
to the table, the residents are the experts on the neighborhood
and how they live and work."
This type of "bottom-up"
collaborative process, as Haverland calls it, was used successfully
when the UDW was invited to help residents of the Dwight Street
neighborhood sort out their needs and priorities. Haverland says
months of meetings culminated in a three-day charrette in 1995 that
was attended by the mayor and about 300 neighborhood residents.
"We had lots of conversations,"
he said, "and not just about bricks and mortar and how to arrange
them. We talked about economic development, education, housing,
jobs, public transportation. These are the things that if present
allow a neighborhood to flourish and, if absent, assure that it
will fail."
One of the chief conclusions
to come out of this process was the need for an auditorium at the
Timothy Dwight Elementary School that could also be used by the
community. In May 2001, more than five years after the process began,
the $2.7 million addition, funded with city, state, and HUD money,
was built. "This is the most beautiful thing I've seen at Dwight,"
said parent Bob Durham at the ribbon cutting. "It's just a pleasure
to be part of this school."
That same year, the
UDW and Haverland, who served as project designer, received four
awards for their work on the school addition. But Haverland says
the greatest compliment came from the community itself. While the
addition was being built, Haverland visited the job site daily.
Sometimes he would notice new graffiti on the existing school, but
never on the addition. "That tells me the community feels invested
in this project," he says. "They're protective of it."
This
isn't how things seemed headed in the beginning. "We were
very suspicious of Yale," says Linda Townsend, Greater Dwight Development
Corporation interim executive director. "A lot of us worried that
they were coming into the neighborhood to take it over."
The UDW does about
35 percent of its work in New Haven and 65 percent outside the city.
Plattus says being from Yale is an asset in most of the state, but
it can be a liability in New Haven. "People worry that Yale is in
cahoots with the city to tear down their neighborhoods," Plattus
says. "We have to make it clear to our clients that we're working
for them."
It took months of meetings
and conversation, but in the Dwight Street neighborhood, at least,
the message got through. "It was a good working relationship," says
Townsend. "Michael (Haverland) really tried to encourage us to come
up with the ideas." Haverland says the UDW is occasionally criticized
for not being architecturally progressive enough, but he makes no
apologies. "You can't just go into a community and say, 'Here's
the hottest idea in urban design, let's try it!'" he says. "We're
dealing with real places and real people."
The Dwight Street partnership
was so successful that now the neighborhood is collaborating with
the UDW to build a day care center down the road from the school.
The New Haven Zoning Board of Appeals rejected the project once,
but planners got another bite at the apple in February. Six days
before the meeting, they gathered in the chilly UDW office to map
out their strategy for persuading the board to grant them the necessary
variances and special exceptions. The meeting was attended by a
dozen people, including Plattus; two law students; their professor,
Robert Solomon; and Townsend. Seated around a table with a box of
doughnuts and a model of the project in front of them, the group
had a free-wheeling conversation about what opposition they could
expect and how to defuse it.
"Their single biggest
concern seems to be that the parking area is too close to the playground.
I can foresee that question coming up again," Solomon told the group.
Townsend wanted to
know how many parking spaces were required for the number of people
who would be using the building, prompting Plattus to jump up and
rummage around the cluttered book cases and work tables for a copy
of the city's planning and zoning regulations.
"How about if we provide
some data on the shortage of on-site day care in the neighborhood?"
a student offered. "We could invite the 'Y'. They've got a drawer
full of people on a waiting list."
The
prep work paid off. After the meeting, the zoning board gave
the day care center its all-important blessing, paving the way for
the project to move forward.
This kind of on-the-job
training is what draws about a dozen students a year to an extracurricular
activity they know will be as demanding as any course they take.
"I came to New Haven
just to go to grad school," says Paul Aroughetti '01MArch, "but
the Urban Design Workshop encouraged me to get into the neighborhoods
and played a role in prompting me to stay." Aroughetti, who is now
an architecture intern at Cesar Pelli & Associates in New Haven,
says his work with the UDW helped him realize there's more for architects
to consider than just the aesthetic features of a building. "It
gave me a greater appreciation for the people using the buildings
we design," he said.
Ethan Cohen '95MArch
says his involvement with UDW helped chart the course of his career.
Today he does similar work as the director of the Community Design
Center at City College in New York and is working on a project in
the South Bronx that, he says, confronts many of the same issues
as the Dwight School addition.
The experience students
get in the UDW is an extremely useful supplement to their academic
work, says Robert A. M. Stern, dean of the School of Architecture.
"Outreach to real community groups is something one can only simulate
in a tentative way within the confines of the curriculum," says
Stern. "The workshop is not a simulation, it's the real thing."
Nobody knows that better
than the residents of Ansonia, who spent months helping the UDW
gather information needed to develop recommendations for the ailing
city. When the analysis was completed, the urban planners rejected
the obvious solution of building a mall or bringing in a "big box"
store like Home Depot or Wal-Mart. Instead, they focused on revitalizing
the downtown by creating a pedestrian-friendly environment and revitalizing
the area's commercial and cultural vitality through streetscape
improvements and the creation of an artists' colony along Main Street.
Students and faculty also recommended subdividing the Latex Foam
site and creating an office park that would house a diversity of
economic activity, rather than one massive employer.
Della Volpe says city
officials are already acting on some of the group's ideas, including
the artists' colony and a riverfront walkway leading to the train
station.
At its purest, architecture
is uncompromised by the mundane realities of budget and community
input. It's Frank Gehry getting a blank check to design the most
aesthetically daring building he could conceive and coming up with
the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Plattus says. But this is
a scenario that rarely happens, and certainly not when it comes
to urban planning at the municipal level.
"You
have to be realistic about what the market will support and
what a town is willing to do," Plattus says. "Our job is to offer
a level of aspiration that sets a framework that is flexible enough
to provide a vision over time." Planners strive to be helpful and
productive "beyond the design of a building," Haverland adds.
It's a difficult lesson
for architecture students, who are eager to see their visions actualized
in bricks and mortar, but while the compromises, concessions, and
community organizing can be frustrating, the realities of the endeavor
are also what make it worth the effort.
Della Volpe credits
the UDW with helping Ansonia residents feel good about their city
again. "We were down and out, but we're rebounding, " he says. "We
feel on the verge of turning the corner."  |
