New Urbanism takes Durango by storm
by Will Sands
 Architect
Janet Wiley’s home sits in a typical suburban setting at
the end of a cul-de-sac. Its nondescript front door is adjacent
to three large garage doors. However, a step inside the split-level
home is refreshing, opening to hardwood floors, an open floor
plan, a vaulted sun room and intricate brick and wood work. And
resting on the table is a set of plans with a mission of forever
eliminating cul-de-sacs and garage doors fronting public space.
It is a plan to get back to basics and away from the car-based
suburbia that has dominated American building for the last 40
years.
“It’s just
a more logical way to live,” Wiley says of “New Urbanism,”
which is the basis for her design of Dale Kneller’s Rivergate,
a development proposed immediately south of Durango on Sawmill
Road. Wiley is not alone in this belief. New Urbanism is about
to take Durango by storm. Every major development proposal before
the Durango Planning Commission includes a component of the “back-to-basics”
development strategy.
New Urbanism can be traced
back to the early 1980s and Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk’s
development of the Florida town of Seaside, which served as the
too-perfect backdrop for the 1998 film “The Truman Show.”
With Seaside, the husband-and-wife time intended to recreate a
19th century southern town in an effort to defy contemporary suburbia
and America’s obsession with the automobile.
“If Martians landed,
they would think the cars were in charge,” Duany has been
quoted as saying. “Suburbia is designed around one ideal:
Keep the cars happy.”
New Urbanism, on the other hand, gets back to traditional town-
and cityscapes. As an excellent example of New Urbanism, City
Planner Millissa Berry and Janet Wiley both point to the obvious:
downtown Durango. “We really took our image for Rivergate
off of downtown Durango,” says Wiley.
“New Urbanism is
basically going back to the tried and true ways of development,”
says Berry.
 Like
downtown Durango, Rivergate will include a pedestrian corridor,
a mix of residential and commercial uses with businesses opening
to the main thoroughfare, a substantial number of trees lining
transportation corridors, an accessible park, natural landscaping
and trails. Unlike downtown, the first phase of Rivergate includes
three large buildings atop a large parking structure. The buildings
sport a modern design and would include both businesses and residences,
one-stop shopping so to speak. Perhaps the most challenging aspect
of the plan, but also its keys component, is density. The first
phase includes plans for 64 to 85 loft-style apartments, as well
as up to 30,000 square feet of business space.
On one hand, Wiley says,
“This is such a prime site. It doesn’t make sense
to subdivide it into eight units and only allow eight people the
views and proximity to town.”
On the other, she notes
that density is one of the cornerstones of New Urbanism. “To
make this kind of development work, it has to be higher density,”
she says. “People attract people, and the object is to keep
them out of their cars and create a sense of community within
a community.”
She adds: “Durango
really warrants this kind of development. We can get higher density
closer to the city limits, where the infrastructure’s already
in place, where it’ll increase the tax base and decrease
pollution and sprawl. It’s pretty exciting to be working
on something that could be really good for Durango.”
Good for Durango
City Planners are in agreement
that New Urbanism and specifically Rivergate could be good for
Durango. The city’s Planning Commission has received Kneller
and Wiley’s work with praise, approving the development’s
first phase Aug. 26. Meanwhile, the City Council is considering
writing requirements into city code to encourage similar trends
in development. And while there have been in-fill projects like
the renovation of the Morehart building with mixed uses and elements
of style, Rivergate is the first development of its size to bring
New Urbanism to the table. But it will, by no means, be the last.
Every other major plan in the pipeline contains at least elements
of the building style, according to city planner Berry. The River
Trails Ranch (formerly Kroeger Ranch) development proposed north
of Durango, Ewing Mesa development with its 1,725 units proposed
above Highway 3 and the Southern Ute Tribe’s proposal for
2,000 new homes in the Grandview area, among others, all contain
New Urbanism designs or design components.
(continued...)
|
