Housing on North Avenue

The Gateway LLC development team was selected for redevelopment of the 3000 block of North Avenue. The north side of the block is mostly rehabilitation and the southside new multi family housing.  ArchPlan is the architect

As typical for these projects selected as the result of public and competitive process, a number of steps need to be completed before the actual design work can begin, let alone a shovel can be put in the ground.


www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.digest300dec30,0,4866874.story
Team selected to redevelop North Avenue properties
December 30, 2009

Baltimore's housing department and Mayor Sheila Dixon have selected a team headed by a group called Gateway to Baltimore LLC to redevelop 33 city-owned properties on both sides of the 3000 block of W. North Ave. in West Baltimore. Gateway is headed by Walter "Skip" Bennett of Edgewater, and Klaus Philipsen of ArchPlan is the architect. They proposed a $4.8 million residential development called North Avenue Gateway, with 48 "modular" apartments on the south side of the block and a mix of new and rehabbed town houses on the north side. The developer also plans to restore an 1892 mansion at 3044 W. North Ave., on the north side of the block, for residential use. Bennett's group, one of two that responded to a request for proposals issued by the city earlier this year, was selected last month to enter an exclusive negotiating priority period to finalize its plans. T. E. Jeff Inc. is a minority contractor on the team, and North American Housing Corp. has been identified as the likely builder of the prefabricated apartment homes.

- Edward Gunts

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

Sphinx Club & Negro League Baseball Museum

An ArchPlan project moves to the next level:

www.baltimoresun.com/business/bal-bz.sphinx19nov19,0,1958072.story

baltimoresun.com

Negro League baseball museum proposed for Baltimore

Historic Sphinx Club on Pennsylvania Ave., other properties would be redeveloped

By Edward Gunts
ed.gunts@baltsun.com

November 19, 2009

Baltimore would become home to the first East Coast museum devoted to Negro League baseball teams and players, under a $4.1 million plan that has been approved by the Dixon administration.
The plan calls for redeveloping Pennsylvania Avenue's historic Sphinx Club and adjacent properties with a sports-themed museum, entertainment and dining complex designed to draw tourists and help rejuvenate the corridor.
The largest part of the project would be a three-story BALL House museum, which stands for Black Athletes and Lost Legends, at the northeast corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Bloom Street. The museum would contain displays about Negro League teams that played before major league baseball admitted African-Americans, including the Baltimore Elite Giants, as well as interactive exhibits such as a batting cage.
The museum would be connected to the Negro League Cafe at the Sphinx Club, a sports bar, restaurant and performance venue that would be created inside the once-vibrant Sphinx Club at 2105-07 Pennsylvania Ave. Planned by restaurateur Donald Curry, the cafe would feature autographed baseballs, photos and related Negro League memorabilia and host performances by jazz musicians and other entertainers.

Additional elements of the project, designed by Klaus Philipsen of ArchPlan Inc., would be "incubator" office space for start-up companies and an outdoor dining area. The Sphinx Club's facade would be restored to its 1940s appearance, while the 5,375-square-foot museum would be housed in a new structure designed to stand out from its neighbors.
The proposal was submitted this fall by a group led by the Druid Heights Community Development Corp., a nonprofit that works to revitalize communities along Pennsylvania Avenue. Other team members include Curry, who ran a Negro League-themed cafe and bar in Chicago's Bronzeville district for five years; the Pennsylvania Avenue Redevelopment Collaborative; and the Black Athletes and Lost Legends Association Inc., a Maryland-based nonprofit that collects and exhibits artifacts related to Negro League baseball. The project is expected to create the equivalent of 37 full-time jobs.
"This is a museum that is going to hold some incredible history," said David Thomas, vice president and communications director for the BALL Association. "This will be the first of its kind on the East Coast. There is a Negro League Museum in Kansas City, Mo., but there is nothing like this one. ... It will be a destination" that will "draw people into the city."

"It's ... a wonderful jumping-off point for the revitalization of Pennsylvania Avenue," said Linda Richardson, executive director of the development collaborative.

Pennsylvania Avenue was a hub of African-American entertainment in Baltimore from the 1920s until the late 1960s, when much of the area was destroyed by rioters. The private Sphinx Club, open from 1946 to 1992, was known for after-show parties with jazz musicians and other luminaries, including Billie Holiday and Cab Calloway.

The city owns the Sphinx Club, which is vacant, and adjoining property at 2101-03 and 2109-11 Pennsylvania Ave. On behalf of the city, the Baltimore Development Corp. and its Main Streets Program sought proposals in July and received one response, the plan for the sports-themed development. The BDC's board recommended to Mayor Sheila Dixon this fall that the city enter into an "exclusive negotiating privilege" period with the developers, to give them 90 days to finalize plans for the project, and the mayor approved the recommendation this month. The negotiating period is expected to begin shortly.

Many of the museum's artifacts will come from the collection of Ray Banks, a Negro League historian who founded the BALL Association in 2008, and the late Hubert "Bert" Simmons, a former Negro League player who established the Hubert Simmons Negro League Baseball Museum of Maryland. BALL's collection, considered one of the largest assemblages of Negro League memorabilia in the country, has been featured in a traveling exhibit that has gone to schools, libraries and stadiums throughout the Mid-Atlantic.

Kelly Little, executive director of the Druid Heights CDC, said his group hopes to begin construction next year and open the museum by late 2011. He said the CDC has a line of credit for community development from State Farm Insurance Co. that can be used for the project and that he plans to pursue other funding sources, such as tax credits for preservation of the Sphinx Club. It also has asked that the city donate the Pennsylvania Avenue properties as an "in kind" contribution.
In addition, the BALL museum group has its own board of directors and fundraising capabilities, and Curry said he plans to use funds he received after he was forced to close his Chicago restaurant when the city moved to acquire his property this year as part of its bid for the 2016 Olympic Games.
Thomas said Pennsylvania Avenue is the "perfect location" for the museum because the corridor has long been a center of African-American history, and the reborn Sphinx Club and additions would make a strong attraction there and help trigger more development.
The Negro Leagues were active from the 1920s to the 1960s. Although the museum will tell visitors about life on the Negro League teams, Thomas said, it's also intended to provide inspiration for visitors.
Athletes in the Negro Leagues "played for the love of the game," not big salaries, he said. "You can't find a more driven bunch of people. The museum will be about the Negro League. But it's also about inspiring people to go beyond the obstacles that face them ... because that is what these Negro League players did."


Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun

Link Light Rail Seattle (Opening Day) July 18, 2009

After some 25 years of back and forth, planning and false starts, dissent and battle the media had decided it was time to celebrate and define this as the project that would make Seattle a really big city. (Seattle Times:” Seattle welcomed light rail Saturday with cheers, applause and a question: What took you so long?”

Boarding the train in one of those unique tunnel stations which were opened years ago as bus tunnel stations and are extra large so that waiting buses can pass each other. Designed with marble and granite and all the opulence otherwise only known from Moscow’s subway. The stations dwarf the trains now added to the buses. The design richness and attention to detail continued throughout all stations, subsurface, above ground or at grade. Kids and adults that acted like kids when they unpack their trainset dominated the trains and all the train aficionados turned out in force.

 

Seattle, Koolhaas

It took some time until I personally discovered Rem Koolhaas’ much praised library building,  this vast and cavernous building. It is rather forbidding on the outside, idiosynchratic with its relentless rhombs slanting this way and that. Bulky, big and sturdy like a dutch girl, yet not entirely without charme, especially once inside.(Well, better leave the analogy to the Dutch girl now). The hefty façade is bearing, of course, allowing large unsupported open spaces which give the library the flair of a convention center crossed with an airport terminal, representing the new aroma for a library in the 21^st century, less stuffy and less bourgeois. The thing is huge with the circulation scheme not all that clear, especially in the upper regions where the simple escalator scheme is abandoned for sloping floors and a book and media maze of sorts. I suppose the building has to grow on you and it has a lot of details and touches that would allow that to happen. Most attractively, it defies the simple architectural categories (like post modern, modern, traditional etc.) and creates its own paradigm, not inappropriate for a use that is so much in flux and in question as a library.

 

 

    

The Role of Design Centers (October 15,2009 Event)

BALTIMORE ARCHITECTURE WEEK: BALTIMORE AIA URBAN DESIGN COMMITTEE SPONSORED EVENT

A Forum: The Role of Design Centers in Urban Regeneration –

A Comprehensive Center for Design in Baltimore

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Location: RTKL, 901 S. Bond St., Baltimore, MD, 21231, Fells Point
Sponsors: PNC Bank, Dana Risk Insurance

Event TopicPublish Post

A successful design center, as shown in other cities, has the possibility to elevate the status of design and bring talent and ideas to a city. A design center is a common ground for several individuals and institutions and industry leaders to bring together and share ideas. It is a chance for an open and public forum of ideas where the design community can share and express progressive ideas for how to improve the city from physical, policy, and social points of view. Maurice Cox from the National Endowment for the Arts will address these aspects from a national perspective.

Presenters

Gary Gaston

Gary Gaston is the Design Studio Director of the Nashville Civic Design Center. He has lead planning efforts for the East Bank, Edgehill, Lafayette and Wedgewood Houston Neighborhoods. He was a principal contributor to the Center’s book The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City, published by Vanderbilt University Press in 2005.Gary co-chaired the Live It Up Downtown Home Tour for four years, and currently serves as co-chair for Education & Outreach on Mayor Dean’s Green Ribbon Committee. Gary holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, and serves on the Board of Directors of Nashville CARES and Artrageous.

Maurice Cox

Maurice Cox was appointed Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts in October 2007. Cox supervises the NEA grantmaking process in design, oversees the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, Governors’ Institute on Community Design, and Your Town: The Citizens’ Institute on Rural Design, and provides professional leadership in architecture and design to the nation.

On leave from the University of Virginia, School of Architecture where he is an Associate Professor of Architecture, Cox most recently led graduate students in the development of award-winning proposals for the rebuilding of affordable housing in New Orleans following the destruction of Hurricane Katrina.

Cox served as Mayor of Charlottesville from 2002-2004. As mayor, architect, and urbanist he was widely recognized as the principal urban designer of his city.

He was a founding partner of RBGC Architecture, Research and Urbanism from 1996-2006 in Charlottesville, Virginia. RBGC’s groundbreaking use of design as a catalyst for social change in the rural town of Bayview, Virginia has received national acclaim and has been featured on 60 Minutes and in Architecture magazine.

Maurice Cox is currently on leave as a partner with Ken Schwartz in Community Planning + Design WORKSHOP (CP+D Workshop). A recipient of the 2004-05 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the 2006 John Hejduk Award for Architecture, Cox has lectured widely on the topics of democratic design, civic engagement, and the designer’s role as leader. He received his architectural education from the Cooper Union School of Architecture.

Notes from the event:

Gary Gaston showed how the Nashville Design Center has become known for public participation and big picture planning in Nashville. http://www.civicdesigncenter.org/

• He explained the four tenets of the Civic Design Center embodied in the logo squares: “Think, Design, Create, Sustain”.
• The Center initially trained over 300 citizens in a 101 of planning course.
• They also produced 15 minute TV shows about urban design in Nashville.
• They worked with 9 inner ring neighborhoods on neighborhood plans.
• They established 10 principles and prepared the Nashville Vision Plan
• They have annual “Living the Plan” fundraising events in which they raise $80-90k each year
• They worked with the Army Corps of Engineers on a Riverfront Masterplan
• They developed a set of site alternatives for the Nashville Convention Center and create baseline specs for it
• They work in a partnership with University of Tennessee students

Maurice Cox emphasized the inclusionary aspect of design, that design should serve the public interest and he sees designers as facilitators, problems solvers, activists and advocates.

• He quoted Thomas Jefferson: “Design Activity and Political Thought are Indivisible”
• He pointed to the book by Ronald Heifetz “Leadership without easy answers” as a useful source from which he explained the term “Adaptive Challenge”
• He stressed that the willingness of behavior change determines if somebody has a seat at the table
• He pointed out that “participation enlarges the community’s capacity to accept change”
• He stated that it is necessary to move the learning to a “neutral ground” i.e. away from City Hall and city departments to a place such as a Design Center
• He spoke about the “gap”: “The greater the difference between aspirations and reality, the larger the gap and the larger the need for trust”. (that a design center is suited to build this trust)
• That learning what is possible should be de-coupled from an imminent project  (and rather be practiced on a longer term project)
• He reported how in Charlottesville as Mayor he had appointed designers to every board in the city and how this made a huge and lasting difference
• He stressed how “doing good” alone is not enough and that it needs to be coupled with “design excellence” and showed the Charlottesville transit center project as an example which had been reviewed by a “Design Excellence Task Force”.
• He challenged the design community to come “to the problems the country cares about” (which are likely not design problems per se) and mentioned the foreclosure  crisis as an example.
• He explained how NEA sponsors grants and that a non-profit needs to be incorporated for 3 years before it can receive NEA grant money.
• He stressed the importance of linage between universities and design centers. The average grants are between $20 and $50k. Half of the design grants went to Universities that had associated design centers.
• He spoke about the “Mayors Institute” funded and organized by NEA which trains mayors (and now also Governors) across the country  in urban design.
• Maurice challenged all present to become active and offered his help and promised to be a friend of our efforts to bring the D:Center to life

Tom Stosur, Director of Planning in Baltimore City stood up and responded to the presentations. He acknowledged the importance of design excellence and that this might not always have been a priority in Baltimore.