News and Events
We have moved!!!!
We are now located in downtown Little Rock, right across the street from Little Rock’s River Market.
Our new address:
407 President Clinton Avenue, Suite 202
Little Rock, AR 72201
501-320-5780
501-537-4560 FAX
The Urban Studies Minor has been temporarily suspended
URST Independent Studies
Each semester Urban Studies & Design offers students opportunities to work on real planning projects.
The students work with program director, architect-urban designer George Wittenberg, and also with professionals from a project’s client teams. Projects such as community gardens, studies of utopian communities, urban design studies for cities and consulting with neighborhood nonprofits are a few of the endeavors in which the program is involved.
Two courses offer this unique opportunity: Urban Studies 4305 - Urban Design - and the Independent Studies Course 4302 to be involved in learning about planning principles applied in the “real world”.
If you are interested please call our office (324-9255) or contact George Wittenberg (ghwittenberg@ualr.edu) or Kim Simmons (kxsimmons@ualr.edu) via e-mail.
Little Rock Central High School Design Criticism by George Wittenberg
(Requested by the Little Rock Central High School Neighborhood Association)
We got a lemon. The Central High Visitor Center is a dumbed down, very average federal building at one of America’s important historic sites. The nation, especially its African-American citizens for whom this site means so much, and the city of Little Rock, also a real part of this history, deserved better.
The Visitor Center does accomplish a most important urban design objective: as a development, it completes the fourth corner of the intersection, creating an important new “place” in Little Rock. Our UALR planning for this urban “place” (requested by Rett Tucker, an enlightened community leader) recommended using this corner – diagonally across from the Central High campus - for the visitor center. So yes, with completion of the Visitor Center, we now have four significant corners, and the visitor knows they have arrived at a special place.
So why shouldn’t good urban design be enough? Sometimes it can be enough. But when good architecture is added to good urban design, we can experience something truly special. We have such an example here in Little Rock of how good architecture and good urban design, (and also good-sized budget!) come together in a spectacular way. This is the Clinton Presidential Center, with eye-catching, elegant architecture placed in an important, axial, connection to downtown. Its stunning combination of architecture and placement, says to drivers-by and visitors – “Look at me, I’m important, I represent a presidency. And, by the way, I’m a gateway to a Capital city!”
And this is my biggest problem with the architectural design of the Central High Visitor Center – it says nothing. It is too much a background building when a foreground building was called for. I know it’s not a presidential library and I know it sits adjacent to “America’s most beautiful high school” – as it was called when it was first built. But this building bends too much into the woodwork of the neighborhood, without the outward appearance, architecture, to declare why it’s there. Sure, neighborhood context is important, but this isn’t just another building! This structure houses the foreground story of public school integration in America. For that we got a background building.
There are bureaucratic, political, and design process reasons the building ended up as is, a shelter for exhibits rather than architecture. A tight budget (which had to include expensive exhibitry) and bureaucratic requirements limited the architects; the politicians didn’t want to fight congress for more money, the local committee wanted to stick to the opening deadline, and the designer had to squeeze a visitor center design together quickly. But it is also true that our local architecture and design community largely ignored the project. That might have been because the selection process opted them (us) out and busy local architects just didn’t care that much. Leadership, if alerted in time, might have considered alternatives – raising private money to match federal and local funds; waiving the deadline to allow a better design to emerge for this, a 100-year project that will be with us a long, long time.
Its exterior form is a basic rectangular box with a pitched (for neighborhood context?) roof over the entry lobby. The siting is good – parking and access work well for visitors. The color, materials and some fenestration detail refer to the Central high School building’s design. I read that it’s designed for energy efficiency, which is good.
The interior doesn’t improve my opinion of the building. It’s a simple and inexpensive interior organized to accommodate visitors – orientation, purchasing, bathrooms and the exhibit. These are the functions of the building and should work well at a minimum. The pitched roof over the central lobby allows nice light in, but its volume is obscured by a web of exposed ducts and track lighting. The exhibit space is improved by a nice touch, a large window that provides a panorama of the real place – Central High and the filling station. The use of the window and the view is smart and effective. It is here, juxtaposed with the view of “today’s” story, that the exhibits do a good job of telling the “historic”story. I wish the architecture had lived up to that story!
I do have to speak in defense of the architect who graciously discussed her reasoning with me, and the National Park Service’s imposed difficult criteria for the architect. Their managers insisted on taking literally comments from the required public comment sessions. For example, when the public said we want a building to fit into our neighborhood, the automatic architectural response is to “add on” a pitched roof. Often the architect’s hands are tied. We have clients to please. (But I think we have an obligation to be better designers than our clients!) Public involvement is very important, but so is public leadership. The National Park Service national design review board also mandates very minimal buildings – not showy. Really, they have dumbed down a process that once gave us elegant public buildings (think WPA) and that now provides us mere shelters for toilets, pamphlets and interpretive displays. What’s an architect to do? So Little Rock got a low budget exhibit shelter. But we got it, by golly, and by the anniversary date!
So, this mediocre building is less the fault of architecture, although there are many examples of inspiring designs based on modest budgets, than a result of the bureaucratic process, the politics of funding and community leadership. We as a community (me included) should have seen the signs early on, and made the hard decision to abandon the idea of opening this building on THE anniversary. And instead gone about funding the best design and budget. We deserved the best. Instead we got much less – we got what we paid for.