Suisman Urban Design

Colin Marshall interviews Doug Suisman on boulevards

BOULEVARDS PODCAST: Colin Marshall interviews Doug Suisman about Los Angeles, the boulevards, city form, and the upcoming reissue of “Los Angeles Boulevard”

SUD Helps Parking Authority Renovate a Huge Public Structure

The Hartford Parking Authority (HPA) has asked Suisman Urban Design to help renovate its massive, 8-level, 1300-space Church Street Garage in downtown Hartford. The garage is highly visible from I-84, and stands directly across the street from the XL Center, Hartford’s main sports and performance arena. The design uses color, graphics, lighting, and wayfinding to help connect the parking facility with downtown’s increasingly vibrant pedestrian network, as envisioned in the iQuilt Plan. The project is funded by HPA with support from the iQuilt Partnership.

ORO Editions will republish Doug Suisman’s classic, "Los Angeles Boulevard"

Suisman Urban Design is pleased to announce that in the Spring of 2014, ORO Editions will publish the 25th anniversary edition of Doug Suisman’s seminal monograph, Los Angeles Boulevard. Since its first publication by the Los Angeles Forum in 1989 in a limited run of 1,500 copies, the book has been much sought after and difficult to find. The new edition will contain the original content plus a new chapter on Suisman’s boulevard work in practice. Please sign up here [link] if you would like to reserve an advance copy. Be sure and read Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne’s front-page feature on Atlantic Boulevard, which kicks off his year-long series on Boulevards: Atlantic Boulevard. In the article, he writes: “Suisman’s concise and shamefully underappreciated 1989 study of the history and design of the boulevards…remains the most important take on this gigantic subject.” Suisman and Hawthorne drove the length of Atlantic Boulevard together during the preparation of the article, and Christopher is writing a new Foreword for the anniversary edition.

Santa Monica Council OK’s Pilot Project for Third Street Promenade

The new street furnishings designed by Suisman for Santa Monica’s famed Third Street Promenade were unanimously approved today by the Santa Monica City Council. The designs have been developed under the leadership of Downtown Santa Monica, Inc. A pilot project will move ahead at the corner of the Promenade and Wilshire Boulevard. It is expected to be completed by summer of 2014.

SUD Plan for Bushnell Square headlines the Courant

Suisman’s conceptual master plan for the campus of the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts has landed on the top of the front page of the Hartford Courant. The newspaper devoted several pages to the project, and to the history of Hartford’s landmark cultural center. The project is being developed in concert with the State of Connecticut, which owns most of the surrounding properties.

The Houston Underground

Our specialization in the architecture of walking means we are keenly interested in walking systems that extend above or below traditional street-level and sidewalks and crosswalks. Minneapolis and Calgary have extensive elevated walking systems (Calgary calls theirs the “Plus Fifteen” system, or 15 feet above the sidewalk), and many cities have bits and pieces of such systems in the form of “skybridges” which connect buildings over public streets – Hong Kong has some very interesting examples. I’ll be posting on Calgary’s system soon, since I happened to visit there shortly after visiting Houston, which has perhaps the world’s most extensive underground pedestrian system, the “Tunnels.” The interconnected system runs more than 6 miles, an impressive achievement, and the map looks like a subway system, with multiple routes and transfer points. When Texans decide on something, they don’t hold back!

Houston – Neighborhood Centers, Inc.

Last October I was lucky enough to participate in the CityLab conference in New York, organized by Bloomberg and the Atlantic, where I met some amazing people involved in making better cities around the world (more on that in another post). One of the people I was particularly privileged to meet was Angela Blanchard, President and CEO of Neighborhood Centers, Inc., the largest non-profit in Texas. I eagerly accepted an invitation to visit Houston, and in December, Angela herself took the time to give me a tour of, among other things, the extraordinary Baker-Ripley Center, a beautiful village-like campus in the heart of one of Houston’s poorest, most diverse neighborhoods. It provides a wide array of services to the community, from pre-school to language courses to immigration support to personal banking. You can read about their wonderful work here: For Good | Home

An Early Icon Turns 50

I can still remember my excitement, as an eight year old kid, when the Phoenix Building opened on Constitution Plaza in downtown Hartford, my hometown. When visitors came to our little provincial capital, we boasted we had the world’s first and only two-sided building (to our young ears it sounded like a wicked trick question – wouldn’t a two-sided building be flat?). The two curved sides of architects Harrison & Abramovitz’s elegant headquarters for one of our many insurance companies looks as fresh, modern, and elegant today as it did then. Modernist architecture has a reputation for being cold, intimidating, and colorless. The “boat building”, as it is still lovingly called in town, is warm, surprisingly intimate, and gorgeously chromatic with its blue-green glass and honeyed wood paneling.

When Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Museum rose in the 1980’s, the term “iconic architecture” was widely used to describe its elaborate sculptural forms. But the Phoenix Building was an icon long before Bilbao. The building just celebrated its, and I was delighted and honored to be asked to speak at the ceremony, mainly because the Phoenix is a key landmark in our iQuilt plan for downtown Hartford. The centerpieces of the plan is the GreenWalk, a one-mile chain of green spaces running from the Connecticut Capitol to the Connecticut River, and the Phoenix building and plaza sits at a major crossroads of the GreenWalk.

So it was a happy confluence of events that when the Phoenix decided it needed to repair its fifty-year-old roof terrace surrounding the building on Constitution Plaza, it used the occasion to “green” the roof rather than just repave it. It turns out that converting the terrace into a garden, and making an integral part of the GreenWalk, cost less than repaving! And the money was already going to be spent by Phoenix in any case, meaning that a major public benefit was provided with private funds. that kind of public-private cooperation is a key premise of iQuilt.

The spur for the green roof was Bonnie Malley, now the #2 at Phoenix. She was inspired by the iQuilt and the Greenwalk, and got the Phoenix leadership to agree to the garden plan. But she didn’t stop there — she agreed to become the chair of the iQuilt Partnership board, and has been doing an extraordinary job of shepherding the plan forward.

Former top State Department official endorses the Arc

Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning in the US State Department (2009-2011) and President of the New America Foundation, has given a strong endorsement of the Arc project for a Palestinian State, designed by Suisman Urban Design in partnership with RAND Corporation. Calling the Arc “a genuinely inspiring plan”, she writes, “Anyone who spends nine minutes watching the video presentation of the Arc will see that its potential is nothing short of breathtaking.”
Read more at http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-cooperation-between-israel-and-palestine-by-anne-marie-slaughter#EROxO4O3BRul04d5.99

Suisman Helps Phoenix Celebrate 50th

Doug Suisman joined the leaders of Phoenix and the mayor of Hartford to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Phoenix’s famous modernist landmark “boat building” and to cut the ribbon on a new green terrace surrounding. The landscape project is a key piece of the iQuilt Plan’s one-mile Greenwalk, a continuous pedestrian walkway from the State Capitol to the Connecticut River. Cutting the ribbon were James D. Wehr, Phoenix president and chief executive officer; Phoenix executive Bonnie Malley (who is also chair of the iQuilt Partnership); and Hartford Mayor Pedro Segarra.