Yale Bulletin and Calendar

November 12, 2004|Volume 33, Number 11

Professor Alan Plattus (center) discusses one of the Urban Design Workshop's community projects with students Guvenc Ozel (left) and Charles Gosrisirikul.

In Focus: Yale Urban Design Workshop

Architecture students gain experience
while helping local communities

If there is one word that captures the essence of the Yale Urban Design Workshop (YUDW), it is "community."

For 12 years, with a distinctively humanistic vision and drawing on diverse academic disciplines, the YUDW has been providing guidance to Connecticut towns and community organizations for projects ranging from individual constructions to comprehensive town plans.

The organization -- founded by Yale professor of architecture and urbanism Alan Plattus -- occupies a storefront commercial space on Chapel Street in New Haven's Dwight Street neighborhood (one of its main clients), a few blocks from its former home and parent institution, the Yale School of Architecture.

The YUDW provides an opportunity for Yale students to gain practical experience with urban planning in a community setting, while bringing the expertise of the next generation of architects to bear on issues facing surrounding towns and cities.

"The work of the YUDW extends the commitment of the School of Architecture, exemplified by its First Year Building Project, to giving its students the chance to work on real projects with real clients, that make a difference in the life of the local community," says Plattus.

It also operates as a non-profit community design center. Clients typically pay modest fees that cover YUDW expenses, including student time and overhead, but the YUDW often helps those clients find sources of funding that cover not only design, but eventually the cost of project development as well. Clients have usually read about or heard of the YUDW in connection with one its many projects around the state or from one their many collaborators.

Whether the project is developing a three-acre parcel of downtown Wallingford or designing a day-care facility in the Dwight Street neighborhood, the workshop is committed to incorporating as many people as possible from the community it serves into all stages of the planning process. The YUDW team -- which includes Yale graduate students, faculty members and occasionally undergraduates -- engage their clients in an ongoing conversation about their needs and expectations and how best to meet them.

"Architecture is at its best when it's a dialogue over time," Plattus says, noting that YUDW has two sets of clients for every project, "the immediate clients and generations to come."

It is this visionary outlook that distinguishes YUDW from its peers, says Plattus. "Conventional urban designers work from project to project. Their involvement rarely lasts longer than consultation or construction," he says.

Most of the YUDW work is done "at the preliminary level," says Plattus; once the project reaches the "nuts and bolts" stage it is either turned over to local professionals for execution or the YUDW associates with a local firm.

The workshop, however, likes to maintain long-standing relationships with its clients. "We like to work with groups we can stay close to," comments Plattus.

Among the notable projects the group has undertaken over the years was to assist the town of Madison in creating a major development plan, a task all Connecticut towns must undertake every 10 years. As part of this effort, in 1996 the Yale workshop organized a three-day charrette, a kind of community brainstorming session, in which town officials, citizens' organizations, developers and the YUDW team discussed their ideas for town improvement -- particularly, how to accommodate the proposed expansion of a local supermarket.

The result was not a detailed architectural scheme, but rather the establishment of a "dialogue" between Stop & Shop (the developer) and the town. With the mediating and creative influence of YUDW, participants in the charrette hammered out a plan to integrate a large-scale strip center, including a proportionally larger parking lot, with Madison's historic Main Street.

Today the YUDW is working on another project with Madison regarding the town's center.

"What happens to buildings over time is important to us," says Plattus, adding that towns, like landscapes, develop very slowly.

In keeping with its philosophy, the studio promotes an "integration of elements" in its proposals -- from combining commercial and public facilities into a primarily residential area to having different household income levels represented in a single community. For example, a feasibility study the group did for the Church Street South Public Housing community, opposite New Haven's train station, called for the re-integration of residents into the adjacent neighborhood.

This "integration" philosophy applies equally to collecting expertise from diverse sources for any given project. The YUDW has worked with the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, the Law School and the School of Management, to name a few of its Yale collaborators.

In planning a new infant and toddler daycare center and adjacent playground in New Haven's Dwight Street neighborhood, for instance, YUDW consulted experts from the Yale Child Study Center as well as parents who would be using the facility. In coming up with a design for Ansonia, where fire had destroyed one of the principal factories of the economically distressed Connecticut city, YUDW solicited a market study from the School of Management. Currently, YUDW is working with students and faculty of the University of Connecticut landscape architecture program to develop a plan for the center of Unionville, a typical New England town along the Farmington River in central Connecticut.

Incorporating sprawling strip malls and big, boxy retail stores into the town of Unionville is a familiar challenge to YUDW, which frequently is charged with finding ways to absorb large-scale, seemingly disconnected commercial facilities into the fabric of a village, whose center may have barely evolved structurally since Colonial times.

Plattus, who sits on the board of the non-profit Connecticut Main Street Center, is particularly experienced at mediating between commercial interests and the demand by local residents to preserve historic sites and pedestrian-friendly streets. Modeled on a program developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Connecticut Main Street Center is committed to fostering economic development in harmony with the community it serves.

Like the Main Street Center, the YUDW -- rather than acting as peacemakers in a dispute -- capitalizes on the synergy created when public- and private-sector goals intersect. When a large supermarket chain announces a plan to develop a megastore in a small town, Plattus sees an opportunity to galvanize community residents and gain the cooperation of the developers at the same time. "Let's see how we can turn this into a win-win situation" is the mantra that Plattus and his team adopt when approaching what might start out as a clash of adversaries. "Stopping the project altogether should be a last resort," notes the Yale professor.

"A project can be a focus for building social capital," Plattus says, conceding that the project itself is sometimes secondary to uniting different sectors of the community in a common goal. He adds that it is wrong to assume that every urban planning problem can be solved with "bricks and mortar."

Not surprisingly, Yale and New Haven are communities that have particularly benefited from YUDW's input. A study led by YUDW set the groundwork for a long-term master plan for the Yale campus. Plattus joined with his co-teachers for the popular Yale course "New Haven and the Problem of Change in the American City" -- Cynthia Farrar and Doug Rae -- along with other Yale colleagues from the Law School and the Office of New Haven and State Affairs to organize a neighborhood planning process that paved the way for the Shaw's shopping development on Whalley Avenue. The store has proved a big boon to neighborhood residents and the local economy.

The workshop's ongoing involvement with the Greater Dwight Community Development Corporation has included such projects as an acclaimed addition to the Timothy Dwight Elementary School designed by YUDW and Yale colleague Michael Haverland and a nearby facility, soon to be under construction, combining daycare, classrooms and office space. YUDW's work with the Dwight Street neighborhood is in collaboration with the city of New Haven and Yale, with funding support from the University and grants from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Another project in the works for YUDW is a collaborative effort with the Connecticut Main Street Center -- a guidebook for Connecticut town planners, designers and preservationists, titled "Renewing Connecticut's Communities: A Main Street Design Manual."

"Architects entering practice today will almost inevitably be challenged to work both globally and locally at the same time," says Plattus. "The YUDW is about applying some of the global resources and opportunities available through Yale to the revitalization of New Haven neighborhoods and Connecticut communities."

-- By Dorie Baker

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