On Saturday, Dec. 13, at Northampton High School, Notre Dame's Urban Design team will present the fruits of their efforts to re-imagine the Paradise City. Though city officials initially resisted Notre Dame's work in Northampton, then tried to put limits on which parts of the city were open to re-imagining, the graduate students have prevailed and provided the public with radical work that is blind to many of our sacred cows.
And it's all the more exciting for it.
Invited to the city by the ad hoc Northampton Design Forum, the team set up shop on Main Street for a week in September and held a design charrette: an intense brainstorm session between the public, city officials, and the team itself, dreaming up a future design for the city. Based on feedback from the community and their own tour of the city, the team began to work almost immediately on "interventions" for the sprawl the city faced. Sketching out plans, diagrams and perspective drawings, they illustrated ways that Northampton could be more friendly to foot-traffic, and they defied logic by showing how Northampton could include more green space to our downtowns while still adding more development.
Even more daring, they explored ways to create new downtowns on King Street and Hospital Hill, where there now is sprawl (or the impending threat of it), and to make these spaces function more as self-contained neighborhoods than suburbs or bedroom communities.
Since their visit in September, the Notre Dame team has been back in South Bend, Ind. honing their work and continuing to solicit feedback. They had a mid-term review in November that included city officials and outside architects, and they have also posted revisions regularly to their website and made themselves available via email. Though the site's been up for months, the flow of feedback hasn't been as strong as they'd have liked …until recently.
During the Nov. 17 public meeting of the Citizens Advisory Committee, Joel Russell urged the committee to take advantage of the bad economy and hold off on the vote that will decide whether to permit adding an extra hundred housing units to Hospital Hill. Russell, who is a land use lawyer and the chair of the Northampton Design Forum that invited the Notre Dame team, asked the CAC to consider the urban design team's work before making a decision on the plan proposed by MassDevelopment and Arrowstreet Architects.
Some members of the committee voiced strong reservations about the Notre Dame work. CAC member Joe Blumenthal said the design Notre Dame had done for Hospital Hill would be a "disaster if it were ever built." Northampton Mayor and CAC chair Clare Higgins said the urban design team had half of Kollmorgen's new manufacturing plant hanging off the edge of a cliff. CAC member Harriet Diamond pointed out that the plan didn't take into account many of the restrictions to the site and built in places that weren't open for development.
This fall, the CAC offered feedback to three presentations by the Arrowstreet architects hired by the developers, and while the pitch given to the committee was updated in response to their critique, each time the plans were essentially identical. Upon hearing the criticism and concerns regarding their work, within days the Notre Dame urban design team requested data they were missing, redrew their diagrams, and posted them online with explanations. Rather than just tweaking one drawing, they provided two plans for Hospital Hill: one that reflects current needs and another that dreams an ideal.
Both plans include large public parks over Arrowstreet's bite-sized ones, as well as integrated neighborhoods rather than the ghettos the professional architects offer. Both Notre Dame's plans will be on display during the Saturday presentation, and the team is currently working on a series of street-view perspective drawings to help people understand their vision.
The team also focused on Northampton's downtown, but Aaron Helfand, a member of the design team who grew up in Leeds, is most excited to present the team's reworking of King Street to his hometown. When he graduated from Deerfield Academy in 2001 and headed to Williams College for his undergraduate degree, he knew he wanted to be an architect. He sees urban design and architecture as joined at the hip and not independent of one another, but he's attracted to urban design because of its concern for the public, while architecture focuses often on creating private spaces.
Helfand already had ideas in mind for Northampton's miracle mile when he came in September, but having his classmates' perspective on how King Street could be integrated into both the neighborhoods across the train tracks and those around the Jackson Street school added a dimension to his thoughts that he hadn't anticipated. The design team's sweeping plan for the area is a place worthy of an afternoon's stroll rather than a frantic trip for groceries, fast food or a new car. Stop and Shop, in their ideal plan, is replaced by a park that's the middle link between a chain of parks—one along the river that used to be Northampton's canal, and another long stretch of community gardens.
Even though the work is meant as an educational exercise, it's not just supposed to teach the students who have worked on it. Ideally, Helfand hopes that their work will inspire all who look at it, and that, rather than arguing about the details, people will see the principles that guided their decisions.
Russell agrees. "As a city, we only think in terms of putting out fires, case by case, this parcel and that parcel," he said. "The Notre Dame group has tried very hard to get people to think in terms of the big picture. The fact that they've chosen to focus on specific areas—I think there's a risk that people may think that this is just about worrying what happens in Florence or Leeds or King Street. But it's about how we see all of that together. Seeing it holistically [through diagrams and perspective drawings], which Northampton's Sustainability Plan didn't really do very effectively, allows people to see where the real development opportunities are, and then to begin to have a shared vision about what to do with those opportunities."
Though this will be the team's final public presentation, they hope this is the start of a longer process of rethinking Northampton. Prior to their public presentation, the team will be meeting with high school students to review their work. Helfand, too, hopes to return to the Pioneer Valley after he graduates, and says he would like to help professionally to see the plan realized one day.
The presentation begins at 3:00. Doors open at 2:30 to offer the public a chance to review the drawings before hand. Their latest work is available at: http://sites.google.com/site/northamptoncharrette/.
