Building Street Smart
For American towns and cities, embrace of sidewalk and street was a natural. It was valuable every foot of the way as people walked or took slow transport everywhere. But with the advent of the car, and a too eager capitulation by modern architecture and planning, this keystone of town-making was nearly lost.
But over the past several decades, the emerging discipline of urban design championed the pedestrianfriendly street, the most important element in making livable urban places. The thrust of this old/new design practice was captured in the 1993 book, “Great Streets,” compiled by Alan B. Jacobs, longtime director of planning for the City of San Francisco. More than a decade before that, Birmingham’s first urban design director, Mike Dobbins, had pressed for good street frontage and insisted that parking decks have active uses along sidewalks. Montgomery’s new downtown plan and the codes passed to implement it put pedestrian-friendly design at the forefront.
This “Building Street Smart” survey presents a variety of projects that take the matter of making inviting frontage seriously. Some are renovations. Others are new. They range from big city to small town, from urban core to suburban fringe. Such response is mandated in some locations, but in each case imaginative architects, responsive clients and others have worked to make walking down the street more pleasurable.
Let’s take a walk by: Concord Center’s luminous lobby, downtown Eufaula’s appealing additions, the urbane Montgomery Renaissance Hotel & Spa, Mt Laurel’s anchor Robinson Building, 2nd Row in Birmingham’s Loft District, three projects by Auburn architecture’s Rural Studio and UAB’s developing University Boulevard frontage.
