A collaborative light-rail master plan involving close to 50 architecture students from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Arkansas (UA) has won a national Education Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
The award, one of only three given this year, will be presented in May during the AIA National Convention in San Antonio. It honors “Visioning Rail Transit in Northwest Arkansas: Lifestyles and Ecologies,” a regional-planning studio that explored how light rail and associated transit-oriented development might ease traffic gridlock, spur downtown revitalization and check sprawl in the Fayetteville metropolitan area.
“This is an effective use of scenario planning with legible, impactful graphics that can be shown to the community,” noted the AIA jury. “There is an appealing levity in the work.”
“Visioning Rail Transit” was launched last spring by the Community Design Center (CDC), an outreach of UA’s School of Architecture. Three studios involving 40 students researched regional demographic and economic trends; used abstract models and mapping exercises to explore possibilities for growth; and presented a series of development scenarios.
The project continued last fall at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, where Stephen Luoni, director of the CDC, served as the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor in Architecture. Building on the UA work, nine students in the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design developed proposals for transit-oriented neighborhoods anchored by mixed-use train stations at three key Fayetteville sites: Drake Field, Dickson Street and the Northwest Arkansas Mall.
“If Northwest Arkansas is still relying on fossil fuels by 2020, that will be the death knell for further economic development. By then, business will go to those areas using renewable energy sources, because ultimately, that will be cheaper,” Luoni said. Creative, cutting-edge businesses also factor in quality of life in their decision-making: “People want affordable downtown housing, which transit-oriented development would foster. And they’re tired of sitting in traffic.”
The Education Honor Awards, now in their 18th year, recognize collegiate faculty achievements and contributions to education and the discipline of architecture. Other recipients for 2007 were the University of Virginia and Iowa State University.