AIA St. Louis Sets Dates For Upcoming Charrette
AIA St. Louis members have been working for the last couple of months on planning a design charrette (good definition) to exam the area along Market Street from the Arch to 20th — aka “the Gateway Mall.”
Monday night the planning group tentatively set the weekend of Friday, September 16th through Sunday September 18th as the charrette weekend. The registration deadline will be Friday August 19th. Invitations to participate will be mailed and posted online sometime next month. Community participation in the process will be encouraged.
Most of the remaining details are still in the draft stage and are not yet ready to be announced. I’m excited about the possibilities for examining these public green spaces and their environs. It has been a pleasure sitting in with the AIA members on the planning meetings for this charrette.
I’ve got my own views on these many blocks and I’ve shared a few on some previous posts. I’m going to hold my recommendations until the actual charrette (well, maybe…)
– Steve
Went to their charrette in 1999/2000 for the area about Olive and Taylor, the northern edge of the CWE. Could have been, though, WashU’s School of Archictecture charrette instead of AIA-StL; can’t remember now for sure.
Though this was a great opportunity to tour the vacant Field School on Olive, many of the ideas devised by the different teams were pretty bizarre. Sadly, one included leaving vacant shells and creating a eerie urban prairie wasteland (proud to say, not my team).
[REPLY – Yikes! – Steve]
Granted, I’m a dreaded urban planner, but I think architects could definitely benefit from reading a little Jane Jacobs before tackling the Gateway Mall in any charrette. Too often, designers see things as a model or from a bird’s eye view, when clearly, we need human-scaled places with diverse 24/7 activity.
[REPLY. Yes! A little Jane Jacobs along with some Project for Public Spaces ideas. The charrette will not be limited to AIA members – they are simply taking a leadership role in the community to get the ball rolling. Participants and jurors will be from various disciplines including landscape architecture and urban planning. – Steve]