16th Annual Design Charrette
26-30 March 2001
The Admiral neighborhood in West Seattle has a small-town feel, with a vibrant commercial core and well-maintained residential areas. Neighborhood planners conceived the charrette to generate public dialogue about development priorities.
This week-long charrette involved the planners, West Seattle High School students, design professionals, and UW students in art, architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning, education, and social work.
At a community meeting of business persons and residents, the design teams proposed:
- A compact neighborhood center.
- Keep commercial and civic buildings on main streets, residential on alleys; fill in gaps with three-four story mixed-use buildings; incorporate detail, setbacks, and overhangs to maintain a human scale.
- Enhanced neighborhood landmarks.
- Use Hiawatha Playfield as a front yard for West Seattle High School, make the entries more open, add historic lights, and brighten the retaining walls with decorative elements; create outdoor paved space next to the Admiral Theater and in front of the West Seattle Public Library; create an outdoor cafe to soften the blank wall of the Safeway.
- A pedestrian scale and character.
- Design building facades with overlooks and terrace to create a stage for civic life; use alleys for varied purposes; repeats a repertoire of motifs throughout the neighborhood; incorporate paving patterns to orient pedestrians and express the neighborhood’s identity; incorporate traffic calming devices.<>
- Linked recreational and civic open spaces.
- Designating green streets that link pedestrian nodes in the commercial/civic center with surrounding parks and major regional open spaces.
- A park-once-and-walk environment:
- Combine street parking for shorter stays, parking structures and underground parking for longer stays; landscape surface parking lots and the roofs of parking structures as open space.
Some of the drawings produced at the charrette were incorporated into the Neighborhood Design Guidelines.
This charrette was funded by the City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. Graduate research assistants for this project included Jim Borgford-Parnell (education) and Christina Merkelbaum (architecture).
