Whittier Peninsula Challenge
Master Plan Proposal

Concept Description

1. Create a dense urban environment with equally dense enrichment of urban amenities and spatial experiences.

2. Create strong visual connections back to the city and out to the “country”.

3. Design a “Town Square” precinct that will serve as a focal point for neighborhood activities and a connection to the larger environment.

4. Provide a commercial district that will serve most of the needs of local residents and attract visitors from the region.

5. Re-grade the ground level with lower level parking at el.708, streets at el. 718 (above the floodplain), with zero net landfill.

6. Locate multi-level structured parking along the railroads, allowing the tracks to be bridged at el. 735.  Here are located the tallest buildings, away from the Metropark and within easy walking distance of downtown.  Housing to the north provides a sound barrier from the freeway with the reward of excellent views.

7. Provide three roadway connections to the east as well as numerous pedestrian connections.  Create activity nodes along Short Street, especially at the Liberty Street intersection. 

8. Retain the Lazarus warehouse as a shell for grand gateway to parklands, festival space, and event parking.  Develop the periphery with housing and cafes.  Provide Metropark orientation center.

9. Maintain open-space view corridors to the city from the distant southeastern periphery of the site.

10. Extend the proposed light rail line from Front Street terminus to the new neighborhood center.

The Columbus Dispatch - the Whittier Challenge

Creative Conceptions

"The biggest issue with this site is it's isolated. It needs to be brought back into the city. That's crucial.

Most visitors see decay and neglect when they look at the Whittier Peninsula.

Designers see funky, hip urbanity. They see Amsterdam. They see an environmental laboratory. They see canals, windmills and rolling hills.

"The biggest issue with this site is it’s isolated. It needs to be brought back into the city. That’s crucial. New life for the WHITTIER PENINSULA is the goal of design-contest winners

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Jim Weiker

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Most visitors see decay and neglect when they look at the Whittier Peninsula. Designers see funky, hip urbanity. They see Amsterdam. They see an environmental laboratory. They see canals, windmills and rolling hills. The 43 teams that submitted ideas for the peninsula last week in the Whittier Challenge design competition envision all of that and more. Mostly, they see life on a 160-acre patch of earth that has very little of it.

‘‘They all exude an optimism about the city and about urban living," said Alex Krieger, a Massachusetts architect and professor at the Harvard Design School and chairman of the design jury.

Krieger and three other judges picked five winners in the competition, all from Columbus. The winners reflected the more feasible and sophisticated entries more than the fantastic or bizarre.

‘‘You look for exemplary work," Krieger said in announcing the winners Thursday night. ‘‘You also look for provocative ideas. Provocation isn’t, however, insanity."

The challenge for many of the contestants lay in finding the right blend of practicality and vision.

‘‘We wanted it to be doable, in terms of what a developer could normally do," said Doug Graf, a professor at the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University and a member of a winning team. ‘‘At the same time, we wanted the results to be spectacular. It was really a question of how to make that happen."
Judges said they looked for designs that skillfully accomplished several goals: combine a mix of uses — residential, commercial and recreational — on the land; include a dense mix of housing; promote the environmental qualities of the site; and connect the peninsula with land across two railroad tracks to the east.

‘‘The biggest issue with this site is it’s isolated," said Bonnie Fisher, a partner in ROMA Design Group in San Francisco and one of the judges. ‘‘It needs to be brought back into the city. That’s crucial. What do you do with the rail corridor? And how does this site relate to the river and the bank across the river?"
Most of the designs extended streets such as Sycamore, Liberty and Fulton across the railroad tracks into the peninsula.

Those streets provided the start of a grid that many designs filled in with a blend of housing, shops and restaurants similar to the mix found in the Brewery District and German Village.
Judges praised the plans’ dense urban mix but noted that many designs were not inviting to families, especially those accustomed to suburban living.

One entry, from a team called the ‘‘High School Drafting Society," comically imagined a 1950s-style suburb on the peninsula. Krieger singled out the entry for making a valuable point: New urban neighborhoods have to appeal to a wide variety of residents, not simply young partiers or hip empty-nesters.

Some participants hoped the competition, sponsored primarily by the city, the Neighborhood Design Center and The Dispatch, would produce more radical visions for the peninsula.

‘‘We felt this neighborhood should be progressive and forward-looking rather than historic, instead of trying to re-create German Village or the Brewery District," said Jonathan Barnes, a Columbus architect whose team produced one of the winning designs. ‘‘I had hoped there would be more avantgarde approaches."

Barnes’ group responded by running a wide canal, lined with sleekly modern condominiums, into the peninsula. A similar plan imagined a series of canals lined with Amsterdam-style townhouses.

The most unorthodox winning plan, by TRIAD Architects, broke away from the dense urban streetscape by creating a quiltlike blend of farming land, ponds and commercial buildings, all dotted with windmills.

‘‘We wanted to overlay what happens in a city block with nature or forest or water," said TRIAD team member Andy House. ‘‘It’s a very experimental way of overlapping uses."

Some were more radical yet. One placed all the buildings underground. Another anchored the site with a huge ‘‘earth museum," and a third stripped a wide green ‘‘spine" across the site that culminated in a grassy bridge to nowhere.

That plan was also one of the few to link the peninsula to the west bank of the Scioto. Judges said they would have liked to see more such plans that took advantage of the river.

‘‘Very few plans recognized that this site is bounded on three sides by water," said judge Christopher Leinberger, a founder of a land-development company and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Competitors were restricted, however, from using the riverbank itself, which has been claimed by Metro Parks for a new park. Some judges said that might be a mistake.

‘‘You want to get engaged with the river’s edge, to connect it with the residents," Fisher said. ‘‘You don’t want the park to be so big that it’s an obstacle to development."

Metro Parks is proceeding with its plans for the site, but a commercial developer for the rest of the peninsula has not been found. On Friday, the city met with some prospective companies in an early step toward picking a developer.

‘‘Obviously, we’d love to have an impact on the development," said Peter Macrae, president of TRIAD Architects. ‘‘But that’s not why we entered the competition. We entered because we thought it was important to participate."

Participants and judges said they hope the city finds a developer interested in looking at novel ideas for the site.

‘‘That’s a lot to expect, but we should expect it," Barnes said. ‘‘A lot of these ideas can be realized. It just takes more thought on the part of the developer."

‘‘You’ve got to find the right developer," added judge Douglas Kelbaugh, dean of the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. ‘‘If you’ve got the wrong jockey on the horse, you’re not going anywhere."

Judges said the peninsula is an extremely rare opportunity to create a large downtown neighborhood nearly from scratch.

‘‘This is a major public resource," Fisher said. ‘‘It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it’s important for the city to recognize that."

Even those who didn’t win the competition saw value in the effort.

‘‘I think it’s a great way to explore different ideas," said architect Jerome Scott, who teamed up with POD Design of Columbus for a submission. ‘‘We’d do it again."

jweiker@dispatch.com


THE WINNERS

MidOhio DESIGN

►         Team: Shane Chandler, Doug Graf, Luke Kautz, Alex Maymind and Matt Persinger

►         Design: A dense urban blend of modern high-rises, shops, stores and housing.

►         Judge: “Reconciles traditional town planning with contemporary architecture.”

►         Winner: “We wanted it to be pedestrian-friendly – not just walkable, but exciting to walk. If you never left the neighborhood, you felt like the whole world was there.”

— Graf

Triad Architects

►         Team: Brent Foley, Andy House, Tim Lai and Peter Macrae

►         Design: A checkerboard mix of farmland, ponds and commercial buildings dotted with windmills.

►         Judge: A model to educate the rest of urban America on how to live with stewardship of the land.

►         Winner: “This is about simultaneous occurrences on land.  Here, water, green and construction combine”

— Foley