In the normal course of business, an architect’s day starts with a client, an idea for a structure, a budget and the directive: Draw this up so we can start moving dirt and swinging hammers.
But drawing plans for a new building to plop onto the landscape is not all that architecture can and should be, according to Charlie Cannon, a co-founder of LOCAL Architecture Research Design, winner of this year’s Collaborative Innovation Leader Award.
Issues that architects can and should ponder range far beyond the limits of brick and mortar and into questions of a project’s environmental impact, economic sustainability, usability by people, relationship with the neighborhood, financing and future maintenance.
“Many of the issues that we face today are problems that an architecture project by itself doesn’t do much for,” Cannon said. “Addressing a multi-layered issue requires collaboration.”
Collaboration: The first part of the award’s name and a big element of everything that the two-year-old business undertakes. Many of LOCAL Architecture Research Design’s projects start with the implied summons: Everybody into the pool! Bringing a lot of different brains – from civil engineer to neighborhood activist – into a project can have the effect of stretching every mind a little bit and reaching solutions that no one expected at the outset.
“The way that we frame a problem when we start [talking] contributes to the outcomes that we get to in the end,” Cannon said. “If you look at everything from the beginning of the process, it is better than solving one thing at the expense of everything else.”
Innovation, the second part of the award name, is a sacred principle at Cannon's company. This quality was at center stage during the One River project, a discussion of ways to open the fabled Blackstone River to some types of commercial development and public access without doing violence to its history and ecology. Cannon co-founded the project with colleagues at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council. It brought together state regulators, environmentalists and developers -- three types of characters that can set off rockets just by occupying the same room – and asked them to talk about uses of the river.
The LOCAL architects posed a basic question: Do certain regulations designed to protect the river – such as 75-foot-wide buffers – really serve the public, which should have access to the river, and serve the river itself, with its noble history as a workhorse of New England industry? Is a blanket order to step back and keep our hands to ourselves the best way to honor and use the river?
Further, the river still has the potential to be contaminated by old industrial sites that are now out of use but that may be leeching ancient contaminants into the water table. The fact is, Cannon said, there is no money to clean up these old brownfields simply because it should be done. Cleanup money always has to accompany a development plan. Is it possible, Cannon’s group asked the regulators, environmentalists and developers, that some form of economic development could help preserve the ecology of the river?
The question was intriguing enough that the National Endowment for the Arts put up study money and Rhode Island School of Design and the R.I. Economic Policy Council jumped in to help organize a series of conversations among the experts.
No specific plans are in the works, but pilot projects are afoot that reject an absolute hands-off regulatory approach and instead look at the whole ecosystem and how it could exist alongside waterfront development. Devices could include creating flood zones that allow public access but not structures; filling in parts of the river or cutting back other parts to develop marshland; or building on cantilevered platforms or posts and piles.
The essential point is that Cannon’s group forced some creative thinking among different people who, in this particular case, are not inclined to sympathize with one another’s views.
“Innovation is solving more problems than you were asked to solve,” Cannon said. “Innovation means admitting that the problems we face are complicated and that the best solutions are found where expertise and disciplines overlap.”
Cannon and the firm’s staff are very big on making drawings – literally sketches, diagrams, graphic images – to help people understand the full impact of what they say they want or do not want.
In Brattleboro, Vt., a very long, straight main street descends like a ski slope to the bank of Connecticut River, where a 990-by-150-foot piece of land had become available for public use. LOCAL Architecture Research Design was hired to help the town decide what to do with the land. Many people said, in effect, nothing! Leave it open, as a park.
Cannon and his group later offered sketches of open land and land with a small building on it. The pictures were accompanied by descriptions and schedules of the amount of time that the land would be used – year round – with and without a building. When people saw that a small building would extend the public’s use of the place into the evenings and through the winter, sentiment changed, he said.
Cannon and his group, with the help of traffic engineers, handicap accessibility specialists and others, also will be using plenty of drawing paper and colored markers for one of LOCAL’s smaller but significant projects. They will be revising the interior traffic plan of the Providence Place mall parking garage with the idea of bringing some vehicular peace to the cross-cutting tangle of travel lanes that make the garage an adventure in head-scratching. Bring on the collaboration. •
