Community Design Center Project Reports

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  Riverine Commons and Institute Framework Plan

  Community Design Center

  The nonprofit Watershed Conservation Resource Center is restoring a 98-acre riparian wetland landscape near downtown Fayetteville as a River Commons and Institute. The Framework Plan combines watershed restoration with architecture and urban design to house a river education center, a visitor interpretive center, walking trails, passive recreation facilities including bird watching and canoeing, and outdoor heritage exhibitions. The Plan operates at the intersection of anthropology, ecology, and design in developing a lasting and robust riverine knowledge fund across space and time.

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  A “Third Place” for the Little Rock Air Force Base

  Community Design Center

  The third place is a widely understood concept coined by urban sociologist Ray Oldenburg to denote those life-affirming civic places that are neither work nor home. In an effort lead by Clemson University, the UACDC partnered with the Little Rock Air Force Base to develop a Social Center – or a Morale Welfare and Recreation (MWR)/Outdoor Recreation (ODR) Center per official military nomenclature – using mass timber technology. Two schemes reflecting mat building typology, a deep-plan, large, horizontal building developed from repeatable modules, were prepared by the UACDC studio at the level of Schematic Design. The first scheme, The Shed, proposes a distinct roof profile sheltering a public concourse with a constellation of informal café, bar, gallery, and recreation spaces serving formal meeting areas on one level. The second scheme, Laminations: A Social Canopy, proposes level changes along a sloping topography while the roof acts as a horizontal datum connecting interior social landscapes of varying heights. Both feature the integration of nature inside the building as distributed fixed features that give spaces a sense of place and affords enjoyment regardless of function.

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  Wood City: Timberizing the City’s Building Blocks

  Community Design Center

  Exogenous forces are reshaping building markets among the 19 real estate product sectors comprising most of America’s built environment. The real estate development value chain is being recast in sectors like fuel retail, fast food, grocery, and warehousing, while new venture-capital interventions are hybridizing housing, hospitality, healthcare, and the senior services markets in value-adding ways. Meanwhile, pockets of low-density metropolitan fabrics—the non-downtown environments encompassing suburbs, small towns, villages, edge cities, exurban areas, and rural areas, which house 85 percent of America’s population —are densifying in response to consumer demand for walkable, mixed-use environments. Disruptions are driving innovation in each of these 19 real estate product sectors, but they are primarily technological and social. Building outcomes conspicuously lack best sustainability practices necessary to build a next-generation green economy. Mass timber technology can play a key role in ensuring that the massive levels of resources the U.S. will allocate to building the next generation of human settlements—close to $1.5 trillion just in 2020—are not squandered by poor practices in energy conservation, carbon reduction, ecosystem stewardship, nonrenewable resource conservation, and climate change mitigation. More than ever, the resiliency of critical human support systems is based upon the competent modeling of climate unknowns in future development.

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  Housing at Markham Square

  Community Design Center

  A former scrap metal yard located four blocks north of Conway’s main commercial street was re-imagined as a new square surrounded by a mixed-use residential district. The new square features “wilded” landscapes for stormwater runoff management and flood control. Proposed multifamily housing with distinct frontages— two-story screened porches, balconies, terraces, patios, and courtyards—will line the edge of “green” streets incorporating stormwater treatment landscapes.

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  Center for Farm and Food System Entrepreneurship

  Community Design Center

  The average age of the American farmer is 58. Since communities are not reproducing the next generation of farmers, universities are establishing training centers to model new concepts and technologies in farming. The Farmers Training Center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. Part of the University of Arkansas’ farm operations near campus, the center is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet. Student farmers learn by farming, from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses, to machine repair, marketing, business planning, value-added food innovation, and cooking. Akin to farmsteads, the training complex arranges different building types around a barn yard. Entry is laminated from parking gardens and orchard, to garage/shop, greenhouses, and barn yard towards a formal training loft amidst the fields. The training loft updates barn technology through its structure made from cross-laminated timber (CLT) construction. CLT construction is expressed in the entry porch and other formal parts of the training center, while the center presents a monumental front to the public highway far east of the farm. The training center articulates the farm as next-generation civic infrastructure central to community well-being.

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  New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village

  Community Design Center

  More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating a permittable solution under most city codes. While informality is traditionally associated with the topography of unplanned hypergrowth in developing nation economies—and not with design disciplines or advanced economies—our project highlights informality as a mode for effecting new urban solutions within obdurate regulatory environments. Indeed, the informal has emerged as an important design epistemology in advanced market economies given the polarization of their economies and the need for distributive justice.

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  Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff

  Community Design Center

  Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a combined Framework Plan, Housing Plan, Street Plan, and a Special Projects Plan, students worked with the design center on the Housing Plan.

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  Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan

  Community Design Center

  Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

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  The Freeman Performing Arts Center

  Community Design Center

  The Freeman Performing Arts Center marks the threshold between prairie and civic life. This small agricultural community of 1,300 has an outsized Anabaptist music tradition recognized nationally. The 37,000 sf hall-type building unifies a miscellaneous collection of public buildings and landscapes at the southwest corner of the town’s one-mile grid. The center’s massing projects an ascending system of familiar gable roofs, which absorb the fly tower into a composition reflective of pragmatic building forms. The principal face of the building is a translucent curtain wall that illuminates interior massing—a beacon on the prairie. A thru-Porch celebrates transitions between the prairie’s agricultural landscape and the intimate gathering space of the entrance plaza on the building’s east side. The west wall’s translucent singularity suggests a compelling civic landmark. Conversely, its east elevation is an intimate edge of articulated windows and charred wood cladding. The center’s economy and singularity creates a compelling icon for Freeman, not unlike the disciplined beauty of regional agricultural structures dotting the prairie.

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  Ralph Bunche Agape Neighborhood Vision Plan

  Community Design Center

  The Ralphe Bunche Neighborhood Vision Plan provides a general design framework to spur reinvestment in this 100-year old historic African-American neighborhood in Benton, AR. The plan aggregates attainable housing (under $100,000/unit) around two neighborhood parks―one existing, and one proposed. Since the city cannot afford comprehensive street and drainage improvements to accommodate redevelopment, the proposal retrofits streets and open space with Low Impact Development (LID) landscapes to remediate urban stormwater runoff. Housing unit types between 1,000 and 1,750 square feet are amassed around these LID landscapes and amenitized with screened rooms, balconies, terraces, and multiple-height living spaces.

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  MacArthur Park Master Plan

  Community Design Center

  Like waterfronts and transit stops, parks leverage value in urban areas. While much recent attention has been given to the signature mega-park, the value of the small-scale neighborhood park in reinventing the city has been overlooked. Once connecting neighborhoods of differing character, and sponsoring more than 80 residential structures along its edges, the historic MacArthur Park at the edge of downtown Little Rock is radically underutilized as an urban neighborhood asset. Severed from its neighborhoods along two edges by interstate construction in the 1960s, this moribund 40-acre municipal park is left with only 16 residential structures along its frontage. The planning concept optimizes the park’s latent economic, environmental, and social potential through improvements to the district’s neighborhood infrastructure, enhancing the delivery of ecological and urban services. This counters the greatest ongoing threat to MacArthur Park District’s irreplaceable legacy―incompatible low-density, suburban-type development that fails to define street edges, and is inherently cynical of the city. The planning goal is to align the park’s capacity to sponsor denser and higher quality mixed-use housing fabric throughout the district with improvements to the park grounds. Rather than treat MacArthur Park as a discrete project, planning for the district’s four neighborhoods extends the park’s landscape into a larger urban landscape network with MacArthur Park as the anchor.

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  Porchscapes: between neighborhood watershed and home

  Community Design Center

  Located on the Ozark Plateau, this 43-unit housing development is a LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) pilot project to be built for $60/sf plus $2.3 million in infrastructure costs. The studio objective is to design a demonstration project that combines affordability with best environmental practices as designated by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Porchscapes is a pioneering Low Impact Development (LID) project funded under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 319 Program for Nonpoint Source Pollution. LID manages stormwater runoff through ecological engineering technologies. A contiguous network of rainwater gardens, bioswales, infiltration trenches, sediment filter strips, green streets, and wet meadows cleans water through biological processes without the use of conventional and costly hard engineering solutions (curbs, gutters, catch basins, and detention ponds). This biological treatment network employs smaller neighborhood groupings developed as subwatersheds, which combine hydrological services with open space design. The project also sponsors America’s first true “shared street”.

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  Habitat Trails . . . a manual for affordable green neighborhood development

  Community Design Center

  Habitat Trails is a green affordable neighborhood development consisting of 17 Habitat for Humanity homes. The site is designed as a sponge to work in accord with existing hydrological drainage, catchment, and recharge patterns. Stormwater runoff is retained and treated through a contiguous network of bioswales, infiltration trenches, stormwater gardens, sediment filter strips, and a constructed wet meadow. The integration of a treatment landscape with open space substitutes an ecologically-based stormwater management system for the expensive curb-gutter-pipe solution in civil infrastructure.