front line for urban innovation?
Are midsize cities America’s
Cleveland, OH
Miami, FL
Oklahoma City, OK
Draper, UT
Rogers, AR
Jacksonville, FL
Charleston, SC
Tempe, AZ
Pratt City, AL
Minneapolis, MN
Cary, NC
Milwaukee, WI
St. Louis, MO
Columbus, IN
Tulsa, OK
Nashville, TN
Memphis, TN
Jackson, MS
Ithaca, NY
Chattanooga, TN
Prioritizing Resilience
Prioritizing Resilience
Instituting Bold Plans
Instituting Bold Plans
Amplifying Downtown
Amplifying Downtown
Reusing Existing Structures
Reusing Existing Structures
Developing Parks and Trails
Developing Parks and Trails
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Establishing Innovation Districts
Establishing Innovation Districts
Strategies for Transformation
An American Makeover
With midsize cities revitalizing downtowns, investing in public amenities, and signing off on climate commitments, urban life is set to change across the country.
All over the United States, cities with populations under one million are investing in bold experiments to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new decade. Their size seems to be their advantage. Lower costs, smaller bureaucracies, and prescient leaders have helped them respond nimbly to both infrastructural and cultural changes.
Text by Ian Volner and Metropolis editors
Designed by Robert Pracek
Nashville, TN
Tulsa, OK
These cities stand out, showcasing multiple examples of urban experimentation and reinvention. But every urban area in this overview proves that new sources of change and inspiration are everywhere if we look beyond our familiar bubbles.
Hubs for Urban Innovation
In June 2020, the city that bills itself as America’s Gateway to the West unveiled its new Equitable Economic Strategic Framework, an ambitious scheme to grow St. Louis by 30,000 residents over the next decade while revitalizing its economy and enhancing its physical infrastructure. The effects are already being felt: this past spring, Mayor Tishaura O. Jones—the first African-American woman to hold the position in the city—signed into law a $250 million, federally-supported bill to rebuild everything from roads and bridges to parks and streetlamps. The municipal government’s efforts are being augmented by public-private partnerships (like the one behind the Chouteau Greenway, a proposed bike-and-pedestrian corridor downtown) and by institutional actors like prestigious Washington University, which has been making improvements to both its historic campus and to its urban surrounds, including an initiative by the school’s Social Policy Institute to expand housing choices for low-income St. Louisans. At the same time, after decades of decline and population loss, a recent influx of immigrants has not only helped stabilize the city but given it a new cultural vibrancy, making it one of the best places in the country to try a Bosnian cevapi or a Vietnamese banh mi.
St. Louis, MO
Design Cities
Olive West Master Plan
Cortex Innovation Community
On Olive
Click on the projects below to read more
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The country music capital of the world is seemingly a little less honky-tonk these days. A major drive of that shift has been the entertainment industry—big Hollywood players like casting giant Endeavor (formerly William Morris) have been expanding their staff and office space, and next year will see the opening of the new 47-acre Music City Studios, a state-of-the-art recording and performance complex in suburban Henderson. With a near 15% population boom since 2010, and home prices soaring an astonishing 25% in just the last year, the challenge facing the city now is where to put all of the new Nashvillians. Mayor John Cooper has been leading the charge for more below-market development, and already this year two new low-income projects, 900 Dickerson Park and 900 Cleveland Park, have broken ground, while Amazon has lately pledged $10.6 million to build more worker housing. While the city may be getting more sophisticated, its down-home soul remains very much intact. In the old industrial district of Wedgewood Houston, the new outpost from international hospitality brand Soho House features country-music performers every night. In Germantown, the bartenders at The Optimist can do international-style mixology, but they’re just as happy pouring straight whiskey.
Nashville, TN
Design Cities
Nashville Warehouse Company
Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Peabody Union
Fifth Third Plaza Renewal
Nashville Public Library / 225 Polk
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An American city of almost any size might consider itself lucky to have just a couple of works by a couple of architects of international note. But Columbus (pop. 48,000) already has dozens of them—an asset it’s been capitalizing on with a slew of programs aimed at driving cultural and economic activity. The seventy-plus major civic buildings by Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi and others (the legacy of local design-loving philanthropist J. Irwin Miller) are at the core of Envision Columbus, a new planning framework aimed at allowing the city to grow and change while preserving its remarkable architectural heritage. The city’s Redevelopment Department has been busy making portions of that broader vision come to life, with new projects ranging from riverside parks to a hotel and conference center that will help draw visitors to the historic downtown and to the larger metropolitan area. While always an easy sell for design buffs—bolstered by Exhibit Columbus, an annual event alternating symposia with site-specific installations, student projects, and more—Columbus is also making a concerted effort to attract culture vultures of all kinds: this year’s events include the All-Ford Car Show, the 25th-annual Scottish Festival, and the inaugural Beard and Mustache Competition.
Columbus, IN
Design Cities
Sixth Street Arts Alley
Exhibit Columbus
Lucabe Coffee
Ivy Tech
Community College
Click on the projects below to read more
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With longtime cultural standbys like the Philbrook Museum (which opened a 75,000 -square-foot expansion in 2019) and the Gilcrease Museum (which just started work on a similar expansion this spring), the one-time center of America’s oil industry is finding new and innovative ways to fuel its future. One remarkable example: Tulsa Remote, an initiative funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is offering grants of $10,000 to workers from cities around the country able relocate to Tulsa. Launched in 2018, the program has continued to grow in the wake of the Covid epidemic, with more than 800 participants joining up last year. In 2019 the city launched the Aero system, a new bus rapid transit (BRT) line spanning the city from north to south, while Tulsa Transit continues to move forward on a micro-transit pilot concept that would allow Tulsans to hire public share-ride vans via a smartphone app. In a gratifying historical irony, the same industry (energy) that first brought the boom to Tulsa a century ago is still making waves, albeit now in a very different form: sustainable energy companies have been popping up all around town, forming lobbying and educational trade group the Tulsa Renewable Business Alliance to bring a carbon-free future to Oklahoma.
Tulsa, OK
Design Cities
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Bob Dylan Center
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Black Wall Street History Center
/Greenwood Rising
This park and surrounding streetscape is engineered to build resiliency into a residential area in the center of Miami Beach. Designed by Savino-Miller Design Studio, William Lane and a team of collaborators, the project employs its central lake as stormwater retention for the neighborhood’s watershed, reducing demand on the island’s “gray” infrastructure, improving water quality through natural filtration, and contributing to local habitat biodiversity.
Bayshore Park
Miami, FL
Size:
19.4 acres
Completion:
Fall 2022
Developing Parks and Trails, Prioritizing Resilience
Courtesy Savino Miller
Often called the Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson and put to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. Designed by Hood Design Studio, this park, located at the brothers’ birthplace in Jacksonville, Florida, will celebrate their lives and achievements and document neighborhood history. When complete, the site will feature a small cottage inscribed with words from Johnson’s poems as well as an outdoor stage—transforming the humble shotgun house into a new mode of engaging with the community.
Lift Ev'ry Voice and Sing Park
Jacksonville, FL
Size:
.75 acre
Completion:
Summer 2023
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Developing Parks and Trails
Courtesy Hood Design Studio
In 2020, New York–based firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) won a competition to design a 50,000-square-foot, galvanized-steel-clad expansion of I. M. Pei’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. PAU is working in collaboration with landscape and urban design practice James Corner Field Operations, architecture firm Cooper Robertson, and lighting designer L’Observatoire International. Construction kicked off in 2022 with Robert Madison International and DLR Group serving as architects of record. The expansion, which includes outdoor concert spaces and landscaped park areas, is meant to better connect the museum to the rest of the city. It will include interactive classrooms, event spaces, archives, and an additional 10,000 square feet of exhibition space.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
and Museum Expansion
Cleveland, OH
Size:
50,000 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy PAU
Courtesy Mel Willis Co.
Courtesy Mel Willis Co.
Courtesy McNeeseStudios
Designed by Los Angeles-based firm Johnson Fain, Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum (FAM), managed by the nonprofit American Indian Cultural Center Foundation (AICCFF), opened in 2021 through a partnership between the State of Oklahoma, the City of Oklahoma City, and the Chickasaw Nation. The spiral-shaped design of the 175,000-square-foot building aims to represent the 39 Tribes of Oklahoma and includes a 4,000-square-foot FAM center and a 280-acre campus along the Oklahoma River, just opposite Downtown Oklahoma City.
First Americans Museum
Oklahoma City, OK
Size:
175,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Amplifying Downtown
Designed to promote built-in flexibility, The Point Framework Plan, designed by SOM with the Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, makes use of market analysis, data gathering, and input from over 10,000 locals to guide future development of seven distinct districts in Draper, Utah. The live, work, play model will offer a mix of retail, entertainment, office, and commercial spaces. The plan also leverages Smart City technology to transform regional rail, transit, and road systems that will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists while reducing the need for cars. One-quarter of The Point has been preserved for trails, parks, and open space including a dog park and community gardens.
The Point Framework Plan
Draper, UT
Size:
600 acres
Completion:
N/A
Establishing Innovation Districts Introducing Ultragreen Policies
With a one million-dollar grant from the Walton Family Foundation, the city of Rogers, in Northwest Arkansas, engaged Ross Barney Architects to reimagine its historic downtown, which has long been bisected physically and economically by a rail line that runs from St. Louis to Chicago. A series of four public plazas (Frisco, Water, Playard and Butterfield Stage) knit the east and west sides of the tracks back together with amenities such as an outdoor performing arts venue, playground, dense plantings, and multi-use patios while honoring the city’s rail-centric history. Over 1,000 responses to a digital survey and multiple in-person charettes helped the architects understand and accommodate community priorities.
Railyard Park
Rogers, AR
Size:
5 acres
Completion:
2021
Developing Parks and Trails
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Kate Joyce Studios
The undertaking reimagined a sunken plaza near downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee’s city hall as a privately-owned public greenspace and urban amenity. With site design by landscape architect Spackman Mossop Michaels and a performance pavilion by Eskew Dumez Ripple, the new park, along with its surrounding open spaces and streets, is a focal point of the city’s burgeoning downtown innovation district (a quarter mile area filled with offices and amenities specifically for tech, creative, and other knowledge workers), and hosts lively cultural events.
Miller Park
Chattanooga, TN
Size:
2.4 acres
Completion:
2018
Establishing Innovation Districts Developing Parks and Trails
Courtesy Steve Pomberg
Located on Gadsden’s Wharf, a site infamous as a disembarking site for roughly half the 10.7 million Africans forcibly shipped to North America during the Transatlantic slave trade, this 426-foot-long museum will allow visitors to explore cultures and knowledge systems those enslaved people brought with them. Designed by Pei Cobb Freed with Moody Nolan as architect of record, the one-story, brick-clad building will be perched 13 feet above the ground on columns to create a contemplative open space beneath it. Hood Design Studio’s landscape strategy, inspired by the tradition of ‘hush harbors’—landscapes where enslaved Africans would gather in secret to freely assemble—includes a sweet grass field and curving brick walls defining the edge.
International African American Museum
Charleston, SC
Size:
41,800 square feet
Completion:
2023
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Developing Parks and Trails
Courtesy PCF/Moody Nolan
Courtesy Catellus Development Corporation
Courtesy Todd Photographic Services
A public/private partnership between Arizona State University (ASU) and Catellus Development Corporation, Novus Innovation Corridor is integrated with the university’s Tempe campus. The Gold LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) certified, mixed-use project is part of a broader university initiative to serve as a community center for entrepreneurship. Designed to drive economic growth by providing the community with access to university research, the development has attracted Fortune 100 corporations, medical research companies, start-ups, and maker businesses. With 4,100 residences, 700 hotel rooms, and 275,000 square feet of retail and entertainment venues, Novus is expected to bring nearly 34,000 new jobs and 5,000 new residents to the downtown Tempe area.
Novus Innovation Center
Tempe, AZ
Size:
355 acres of land under development;
10 million square feet of mixed-use space
Completion:
2035
Establishing Innovation Districts
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
In April 2011, a super cell EF4 tornado, one of the largest ever recorded, cleared a path over a mile wide and 80 miles long across Alabama and through Pratt City. Sitting in the former path of the tornado, FEMA-funded One Pratt Park was envisioned as the new heart of the restored community. TLS Landscape Architecture designed the eight-acre development with bright, optimistic colors, building a “living room” structure that opens to a green space for events and festivals, a hillside children’s playscape with natural slides, a rainwater collection system that irrigates a park stream, a hilltop signal tower, and an amphitheater for music performances and weddings.
One Pratt Park
Pratt City, AL
Size:
8 acres
Completion:
2019
Developing Parks and Trails, Prioritizing Resilience
Courtesy TLS Landscape Architecture
Courtesy Corey Gaffer
Courtesy Corey Gaffer
Courtesy Lane Pelovsky
Transforming an abandoned 2.5-acre site in downtown Minneapolis into a welcoming public space, Water Works Park offers expansive views of the of the Mississippi River and features flexible outdoor space, plazas, seating, picnic lawns, native gardens, a play area, children’s garden, and bike and pedestrian paths. Landscape architect Damon Farber engaged with the community to honor the park’s location within the Saint Anthony Falls Historic District and its strong cultural connection to the Dakota people. The design team repurposed and rehabilitated historic mill walls, incorporated site features like steel gears, and installed narrative plaques that recognize the cultural and spiritual importance of the site for First Nations peoples.
Water Works Park
Minneapolis, MN
Size:
2.5 acres
Completion:
May 2021
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Reusing Existing Structures
OJB and Machado Silvetti designed Downtown Cary Park, which balances active programming with a unique botanical experience. Showcasing plants native to North Carolina, the park is filled with shade gardens, perennial gardens, wetlands, pollinator gardens, and meadows. Weaving through the flora and taking advantage of the project’s change in elevation, raised walkways, winding paths, and water features connect a series of “outdoor rooms.” These include a children’s play environment designed for non-prescriptive play; the great lawn, a flexible gathering spot for community events and concerts; and a house and garden for special events.
Downtown Cary Park
Cary, NC
Size:
7 acres
Completion:
Summer 2023
Developing Parks and Trails, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy OJB and Machado Silvetti
Ten years after the closing of Milwaukee’s Pabst Brewery in 1996, late real estate developer and philanthropist Joseph J. Zilber purchased this seven-block site—including other historic buildings like an 1872 German Methodist church. Setting out to redevelop the area into Milwaukee’s next great neighborhood, Zilber created the Brewery Project LLC, the largest public-private partnership in the city’s history, rezoning the property from manufacturing to mixed use. Since initial work began, over $300 million has been invested in The Brewery complex. Now a LEED Platinum Neighborhood Development, it includes five apartment developments, a 400-bed luxury student residential property, three office buildings, two hotel properties, two breweries, three restaurants, and two private parking areas, and is the home of the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s School of Public Health.
The Brewery District
Milwaukee, WI
Size:
20 acres
Completion:
2018
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy The Brewery District
More than twenty years since its inception, this sprawling tech-and-business campus on St. Louis’s south side is a model for innovation quarters around the country. What was once a neglected industrial zone is now a 200-acre job-making machine, with nearly three hundred companies employing 10,000-plus workers in fields like software development, bioscience, and manufacturing. Organized into separate sub-centers, and overseen by a dedicated non-profit organization, the compound—master planned by HOK—also boasts recreational and cultural amenities that have made it a boon to the surrounding community.
Cortex Innovation Community
Size:
4.5 million square feet
Completion:
Ongoing (50 percent complete)
Establishing Innovation Districts
Courtesy Pete Vondelinde
Courtesy Tatiana Bilbao
Courtesy Tatiana Bilbao
Courtesy Rodrigo Chapa
Olive West is an attempt to catalyze a housing renaissance in the heart of St. Louis. (Albeit, not a very affordable one.) On a small tract in the Covenant Blu Grand Center, local real estate company Owen Development has hired Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao to master plan a complex that will include 27 residential structures by a cavalcade of high-profile designers, including Boston’s Höweler + Yoon, New York’s MOS, and Mexico City’s Productora. The effort is aimed at attracting young creatives and other urbanites who might otherwise have migrated to larger Midwestern or coastal cities. For added appeal, Bilbao’s masterplan features communal and green spaces threaded delicately through the site.
Olive West Master Plan
Size:
3.3 acres
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
LA-based firm Michael Maltzan Architecture’s contribution to the Olive West scheme is emblematic of the development’s design-forward ambition. On a previously empty block, the 35-unit multifamily project comprises a pair of volumes with jagged, zig-zagging footprints that make their way around a landscaped central courtyard. Strikingly contemporary in outline, the design is also perfectly tuned to the scale and tempo of the surrounding fabric—a newcomer determined to get along with the neighbors.
On Olive
St. Louis, MO
Size:
32,400 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture
Originally designed by late-modernist master Harry Weese, the little low-rise structure on Eastbrook Plaza in Columbus was built in 1961 as a bank. It remained so until 2020, then went tenant-less for a year until local entrepreneurs Alissa and Tyler Hodge came along. Overseeing the interior redesign themselves, the couple transformed the historic space into a bright, homey café, a hit with locals that preserves the midcentury structure while giving it a stylish, twenty-first century gloss.
Lucabe Coffee
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Reusing Existing Structures
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
Right in the middle of downtown Columbus, the Sixth Street Arts Alley is the thin end of an ambitious urbanist wedge; a scheme to transform a portion of the city into a pedestrian paradise. Designed by Columbus-based firm LAA Office, the Alley looks to draw foot traffic by way of a colorful mural that covers not just the roadway but also—with an assist from artist Nick Smith—creeps up the walls of the surrounding buildings. Inviting street furniture, outdoor eateries, and year-round programming make the alley a lively hub.
Sixth Street Arts Alley
Size:
10,000 square feet (mural)
Completion:
2021 (Phase 1)
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
A highlight of Columbus’s culture calendar, Exhibit Columbus brings upwards of 30,000 visitors every other year to view site-specific installations, pop-ups pavilions, talks, film screenings and more, presented by a brace of up-and-coming local and international designers. (The organization hosts symposia in non-exhibition years.) Each installment of the show revolves around a central concept chosen by a notable curatorial team, and the public installations are sprinkled all over downtown and beyond, allowing the city’s unique architectural heritage to serve as a dramatic backdrop.
Exhibit Columbus
Size:
N/A
Completion:
Launched 2017, ongoing
Resurfacing Cultural Histories, Instituting Bold Plans
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
San Francisco-based architects Iwamoto Scott have designed a new building for Ivy Tech Community College located within the AirPark Columbus College Campus—a unique cluster of three college institutions (Ivy Tech, Purdue Polytechnic, and Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus) with shared facilities designed KPF and Pelli Clarke Pelli, and a developing landscape plan by GGN. (Much of the project has been funded through grants from the local Cummins Foundation.) Ivy Tech’s white brick structure, incorporating exterior terraces, outdoor learning spaces, and carved-in apertures, is organized around a centrally-located social spine lit by three clerestory volumes. Its flexible, airy spaces are designed to promote community building and project-based learning. Completion is set for late this year.
Ivy Tech Community College, Columbus Campus
Columbus, IN
Size:
80,000 square feet
Completion:
Late 2022
Establishing Innovation Districts
Designed by KPF in 1986, the Fifth Third Center is a familiar fixture on the Nashville skyline—but at ground level, it was in serious need of a refresh. Gresham Smith came through with the new Fifth Third Plaza, a casual-cool public space that provides an engaging contrast to the highly formal tower behind it: lushly planted, fitted with all-wood seating and a shady arbor, the design provides the city’s bustling core with a human-scaled moment of calm.
Fifth Third Plaza Renewal
Nashville, TN
Size:
14,000 square feet
Completion:
2022
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Gresham Smith
With Nashville’s municipal government committed to moving toward a 100 percent renewable energy supply, the groundbreaking earlier this year of the Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative in nearby Shelbyville represents a major leap forward. The 370-acre solar farm, launched in tandem with famed public utility the Tennessee Valley Authority and private company Solar Ranch, will offset 70 percent of Vanderbilt University’s annual carbon emissions—and it’s just one small part of a vast landscape of photovoltaics cropping up all over the state.
Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Nashville, TN
Size:
14,000 square feet, 370.5 acres
Completion:
Late 2022
Instituting Bold Plans
Courtesy tk
Emblematic of the region’s ongoing transformation is the Nashville Warehouse Company, which brings 200,000 square feet of office space to the once-thinly peopled industrial district of Wedgewood Houston. Complemented by expansive greenspace and an outdoor performance venue, the buildings from Chicago-based office Hartshorne Plunkard are constructed of mass timber—the first such project in Nashville. It’s a suitably innovative solution for a development meant to signal Nashville’s new economic direction. The design from Chicago-based office Hartshorne Plunkard deploys mass timber—the first such project in Nashville. It’s a suitably innovative solution for a development meant to signal Nashville’s new economic direction.
Nashville Warehouse Company
Nashville, TN
Size:
200,000 square feet; 5.2 acres
Completion:
2021
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Courtesy Mary Craven
Perhaps no single area in Nashville is poised for more dramatic change than the long-neglected eastern shore of the Cumberland River. The formerly industrial area is now slated to become a thriving live-work district filled with public space. The Peabody Union project from Nashville’s own office Hastings Architecture provides a foretaste of the area’s future: a massive mixed-use complex, the development will feature a landscaped public corridor running clear through it, connecting the waterfront to the fast-growing commercial district further inland. The ensemble’s tough, ruddy exterior is a keen reminder of the past, echoing the look of the still-standing trolley barns next door.
Peabody Union
Nashville, TN
Size:
755,000 square feet
Completion:
2024
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy HASTINGS
Designed by Bruce Crabtree in 1965, the former crown jewel of the Nashville Public Library system sat vacant for sixteen years after its original tenants left in 2001. It finally found one in local firm Hastings Architecture, who transformed it into 225 Polk, an office space (now partially occupied by the firm itself), with a public-programming component, The Athenaeum, capable of hosting up to 300 people for meetings, lectures, town halls and more. Rehabilitating the structure to its midcentury glory, the design team also opened it up, glazing previously walled-in section of the exterior to make the building feel truly a part of the city.
Nashville Public Library
/ 225 Polk
Nashville, TN
Size:
42,000 square feet
Completion:
2020
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy HASTINGS
Political agitator, social outcast, Christian convert: songwriter Robert Allen Zimmerman, AKA Bob Dylan, has always been remaking himself, providing plenty of fodder for the new museum in Tulsa that bears his (more familiar) name. Designed by architects Olson Kundig, the center boasts a collection of over 100,000 items tracking the artist’s protean career; its Oklahoman locale seems only fitting, situating Dylan’s life and work in the landscape that has always filled his music: the American heartland. The project represents a major win for the city and for the George Kaiser Foundation, the philanthropic organization that fought to bring Dylan's archive to the city as part of a major downtown redevelopment scheme.
Bob Dylan Center
Tulsa, OK
Size:
29,000 square feet
Completion:
Spring 2022
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Matthew Millman
In 2017, the City of Memphis enlisted Studio Gang to transform its previously neglected five-mile-long riverfront. Informed by engagement with more than 4,000 locals, the resulting revitalization concept features Tom Lee Park at its center. Named after a Black river worker famous for saving 32 people in a 1925 steamship wreck, the 30-acre park is set to reopen in 2023 as a “civic commons,” designed to welcome and restore the surrounding community, which includes the lowest-income zip code in the state. SCAPE-designed landscape architecture will add a thousand new trees and native plantings, replenishing soils and strengthening the connection between downtown Memphis and the Mississippi River.
Tom Lee Park
Memphis, TN
Size:
30 acres
Completion:
2023
Developing Parks and Trails
© Studio Gang and SCAPE, Courtesy Memphis River Parks Partnership
Developed by interdisciplinary practice Carbon Office in collaboration with the city of Jackson, this phased project creates a scenic, multiuse recreational trail that will ultimately connect Jackson’s downtown to destinations around the city. Overall, it will provide access to three parks and six museums along the route, and two and a half miles of the system will follow the route of old railway lines that wind through the area. The trail is designed to serve walkers, runners, cyclists, and rollerbladers as well as nature and culture lovers.
Museum Trail
Jackson, MS
Size:
5 miles long
Completion:
2020 (Phase 1), 2022 (Phase II)
Developing Parks and Trails
Courtesy Carbon Office
Just steps from Greenwood Rising, the Cultural Center is the traditional focal point of the local African-American community, playing host to public events, youth groups, educational programming and more. With private sources footing the $9 million cost, the facility will shortly get an extensive overhaul. Collaborators Moody Nolan and JCJ Architecture were recently announced as the project’s designers. (The choice is especially apt: Moody Nolan is the country’s largest African-American led office.)
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Tulsa, OK
Size:
10,000 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Courtesy tk
On the historic east side of downtown Tulsa, Greenwood Rising commemorates the 1921 massacre when vicious race riots tore through the city and destroyed what had been a thriving African-American commercial district located on the very site of the museum itself. The structure, designed by hometown office Selser Schaefer Architects, is a suitably somber composition, but in a cool, modern idiom that looks to the area’s promising future while acknowledging its tragic past.
Black Wall Street History Center/Greenwood Rising
Tulsa, OK
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Courtesy Melissa Lukenbaugh
As a major component of its Green New Deal addressing climate change and racial injustice, Ithaca (population 30,715) recently became the first U.S. city to commit to electrifying and decarbonizing all of its buildings (That's 8,000 structures, with a deadline of 2030.) The city is amending its energy code to require new buildings to be net zero beginning in 2026, and is partnering with BlocPower, a tech company that specializes in retrofitting pre-existing buildings with sustainable technologies. The city received a grant from New York State to develop its plans and has secured significant investments from New York State Electric and Gas and private equity firm Alturus.
Ithaca Green New Deal
Ithaca, NY
Size:
N/A
Completion:
2030
Strategies for Transformation:
Ultragreen Development
Courtesy tk
Columbus, IN
Hubs for Urban Innovation
These cities have a multipronged approach to urban experimentation and reinvention.
Oklahoma City, OK
Cleveland, OH
Draper, UT
Rogers, AR
Jacksonville, FL
Chattanooga, TN
Charleston, SC
Miami, FL
Tempe, AZ
Pratt City, AL
Minneapolis, MN
Cary, NC
Milwaukee, WI
Memphis, TN
Jackson, MS
Tulsa, OK
Nashville, TN
St. Louis, MO
Columbus, IN
Ithaca, NY
An American Makeover
With midsize cities revitalizing downtowns, investing in public amenities, and signing off on climate commitments, urban life is set to change across the country.
All over the United States, cities with populations under one million are investing in bold experiments to meet the challenges and opportunities of this new decade. Their size seems to be their advantage. Lower costs, smaller bureaucracies, and prescient leaders have helped them respond nimbly to both infrastructural and cultural changes.
Ithaca, NY
The first U.S. city to begin 100% decarbonization of its buildings is
St. Louis, MO
An all-star team of architects is planning a neighborhood in
Draper, UT
The first planned 15-minute district
in the United States is in
The country music capital of the world is seemingly a little less honky-tonk these days. A major drive of that shift has been the entertainment industry—big Hollywood players like casting giant Endeavor (formerly William Morris) have been expanding their staff and office space, and next year will see the opening of the new 47-acre Music City Studios, a state-of-the-art recording and performance complex in suburban Henderson. With a near 15% population boom since 2010, and home prices soaring an astonishing 25% in just the last year, the challenge facing the city now is where to put all of the new Nashvillians. Mayor John Cooper has been leading the charge for more below-market development, and already this year two new low-income projects, 900 Dickerson Park and 900 Cleveland Park, have broken ground, while Amazon has lately pledged $10.6 million to build more worker housing. While the city may be getting more sophisticated, its down-home soul remains very much intact. In the old industrial district of Wedgewood Houston, the new outpost from international hospitality brand Soho House features country-music performers every night. In Germantown, the bartenders at The Optimist can do international-style mixology, but they’re just as happy pouring straight whiskey.
Nashville, TN
Design Cities
Peabody Union
Fifth Third Plaza Renewal
Nashville Public Library / 225 Polk
Explore more Nashville stories
Nashville Warehouse Company
Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
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In June 2020, the city that bills itself as America’s Gateway to the West unveiled its new Equitable Economic Strategic Framework, an ambitious scheme to grow St. Louis by 30,000 residents over the next decade while revitalizing its economy and enhancing its physical infrastructure. The effects are already being felt: this past spring, Mayor Tishaura O. Jones—the first African-American woman to hold the position in the city—signed into law a $250 million, federally-supported bill to rebuild everything from roads and bridges to parks and streetlamps. The municipal government’s efforts are being augmented by public-private partnerships (like the one behind the Chouteau Greenway, a proposed bike-and-pedestrian corridor downtown) and by institutional actors like prestigious Washington University, which has been making improvements to both its historic campus and to its urban surrounds, including an initiative by the school’s Social Policy Institute to expand housing choices for low-income St. Louisans. At the same time, after decades of decline and population loss, a recent influx of immigrants has not only helped stabilize the city but given it a new cultural vibrancy, making it one of the best places in the country to try a Bosnian cevapi or a Vietnamese banh mi.
St. Louis, MO
Design Cities
On Olive
Cortex Innovation Community
Olive West Master Plan
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This park and surrounding streetscape is engineered to build resiliency into a residential area in the center of Miami Beach. Designed by Savino-Miller Design Studio, William Lane and a team of collaborators, the project employs its central lake as stormwater retention for the neighborhood’s watershed, reducing demand on the island’s “gray” infrastructure, improving water quality through natural filtration, and contributing to local habitat biodiversity.
Bayshore Park
Miami, FL
Size:
19.4 acres
Completion:
Fall 2022
Developing Parks and Trails, Prioritizing Resilience
Courtesy Savino Miller
TIn 2020, New York–based firm Practice for Architecture and Urbanism (PAU) won a competition to design a 50,000-square-foot, galvanized-steel-clad expansion of I. M. Pei’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. PAU is working in collaboration with landscape and urban design practice James Corner Field Operations, architecture firm Cooper Robertson, and lighting designer L’Observatoire International. Construction kicked off in 2022 with Robert Madison International and DLR Group serving as architects of record. The expansion, which includes outdoor concert spaces and landscaped park areas, is meant to better connect the museum to the rest of the city. It will include interactive classrooms, event spaces, archives, and an additional 10,000 square feet of exhibition space.
Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
and Museum Expansion
Cleveland, OH
Courtesy PAU
Size:
50,000-square-feet
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
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As a major component of its Green New Deal addressing climate change and racial injustice, Ithaca (population 30,715) recently became the first U.S. city to commit to electrifying and decarbonizing all of its buildings (That's 8,000 structures, with a deadline of 2030.) The city is amending its energy code to require new buildings to be net zero beginning in 2026, and is partnering with BlocPower, a tech company that specializes in retrofitting pre-existing buildings with sustainable technologies. The city received a grant from New York State to develop its plans and has secured significant investments from New York State Electric and Gas and private equity firm Alturus.
Ithaca Green New Deal
Ithaca, NY
Size:
N/A
Completion:
2030
Ultragreen Development
On the historic east side of downtown Tulsa, Greenwood Rising commemorates the 1921 massacre when vicious race riots tore through the city and destroyed what had been a thriving African-American commercial district located on the very site of the museum itself. The structure, designed by hometown office Selser Schaefer Architects, is a suitably somber composition, but in a cool, modern idiom that looks to the area’s promising future while acknowledging its tragic past.
Black Wall Street
History Center/
Greenwood Rising
Tulsa, OK
Courtesy Melissa Lukenbaugh
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Just steps from Greenwood Rising, the Cultural Center is the traditional focal point of the local African-American community, playing host to public events, youth groups, educational programming and more. With private sources footing the $9 million cost, the facility will shortly get an extensive overhaul. Collaborators Moody Nolan and JCJ Architecture were recently announced as the project’s designers. (The choice is especially apt: Moody Nolan is the country’s largest African-American led office.)
Courtesy Melissa Lukenbaugh
Size:
10,000 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Tulsa, OK
Political agitator, social outcast, Christian convert: songwriter Robert Allen Zimmerman, AKA Bob Dylan, has always been remaking himself, providing plenty of fodder for the new museum in Tulsa that bears his (more familiar) name. Designed by architects Olson Kundig, the center boasts a collection of over 100,000 items tracking the artist’s protean career; its Oklahoman locale seems only fitting, situating Dylan’s life and work in the landscape that has always filled his music: the American heartland. The project represents a major win for the city and for the George Kaiser Foundation, the philanthropic organization that fought to bring Dylan's archive to the city as part of a major downtown redevelopment scheme.
Bob Dylan Center
Tulsa, OK
Size:
19.4 acres
Completion:
Fall 2022
Developing Parks and Trails, Prioritizing Resilience
Courtesy Matthew Millman
Developed by interdisciplinary practice Carbon Office in collaboration with the city of Jackson, this phased project creates a scenic, multiuse recreational trail that will ultimately connect Jackson’s downtown to destinations around the city. Overall, it will provide access to three parks and six museums along the route, and two and a half miles of the system will follow the route of old railway lines that wind through the area. The trail is designed to serve walkers, runners, cyclists, and rollerbladers as well as nature and culture lovers.
Museum Trail
Jackson, MS
Size:
5 miles long
Completion:
2020 (Phase 1),
2022 (Phase II)
Developing Parks and Trails
Courtesy Carbon Office
Columbus, IN
Columbus, IN
Columbus, IN
St. Louis, MO
St. Louis, MO
In 2017, the City of Memphis enlisted Studio Gang to transform its previously neglected five-mile-long riverfront. Informed by engagement with more than 4,000 locals, the resulting revitalization concept features Tom Lee Park at its center. Named after a Black river worker famous for saving 32 people in a 1925 steamship wreck, the 30-acre park is set to reopen in 2023 as a “civic commons,” designed to welcome and restore the surrounding community, which includes the lowest-income zip code in the state. SCAPE-designed landscape architecture will add a thousand new trees and native plantings, replenishing soils and strengthening the connection between downtown Memphis and the Mississippi River.
Tom Lee Park
Memphis, TN
Size:
30 acres
Completion:
2023
Developing Parks and Trails
© Studio Gang and SCAPE, Courtesy Memphi
for urban innovation?
Are midsize cities
America’s front line
Ithaca, NY
The first U.S. district to begin 100% decarbonization of its buildings is
Draper, UT
The first planned 15-minute district
in the United States is in
St. Louis, MO
An all-star team of architects is planning a neighborhood in
Every white dot represents a city. Click on each one to explore its trailblazing projects.
There are dozens more such examples across America.
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Sited in the heart of Downtown Omaha, Gene Leahy Mall is a key component of the city’s RiverFront development—three connected parks set to reinvigorate the urban core and enhance connections to the Missouri River. With financial support from the city of Omaha and local philanthropists like Warren Buffet, OJB and HDR have led a complete revamp of the 70’s era open space, reestablishing pedestrian access at street level, organizing uses around a large pond, and introducing vibrant furnishings and varied drought-tolerant trees and plantings. Its collection of spaces includes a central event lawn and performance pavilion, multi-use social spaces, sculpture garden, dog park, north/south promenade, children’s play area, interactive water feature, and a games area.
Gene Leahy Mall
Omaha, NE
Size:
14.8 acres
Completion:
2022
Strategies for Transformation:
Developing Parks and Trails, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Jeff Durkin
Omaha, NE
Omaha, NE
Nashville Public Library
/ 225 Polk
Nashville, TN
Courtesy HASTINGS
Size:
42,000 square feet
Completion:
2020
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Designed by Bruce Crabtree in 1965, the former crown jewel of the Nashville Public Library system sat vacant for sixteen years after its original tenants left in 2001. It finally found one in local firm Hastings Architecture, who transformed it into 225 Polk, an office space (now partially occupied by the firm itself), with a public-programming component, The Athenaeum, capable of hosting up to 300 people for meetings, lectures, town halls and more. Rehabilitating the structure to its midcentury glory, the design team also opened it up, glazing previously walled-in section of the exterior to make the building feel truly a part of the city.
Peabody Union
Nashville, TN
Size:
755,000 square feet
Completion:
2024
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy HASTINGS
Perhaps no single area in Nashville is poised for more dramatic change than the long-neglected eastern shore of the Cumberland River. The formerly industrial area is now slated to become a thriving live-work district filled with public space. The Peabody Union project from Nashville’s own office Hastings Architecture provides a foretaste of the area’s future: a massive mixed-use complex, the development will feature a landscaped public corridor running clear through it, connecting the waterfront to the fast-growing commercial district further inland. The ensemble’s tough, ruddy exterior is a keen reminder of the past, echoing the look of the still-standing trolley barns next door.
Nashville Warehouse
Company
Nashville, TN
Courtesy Mary Craven
Size:
200,000 square feet; 5.2 acres
Completion:
2021
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Nashville Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Nashville, TN
Courtesy Mary Craven
Size:
14,000 square feet; 370.5 acres
Completion:
Late 2022
Instituting Bold Plans
With Nashville’s municipal government committed to moving toward a 100 percent renewable energy supply, the groundbreaking earlier this year of the Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative in nearby Shelbyville represents a major leap forward. The 370-acre solar farm, launched in tandem with famed public utility the Tennessee Valley Authority and private company Solar Ranch, will offset 70 percent of Vanderbilt University’s annual carbon emissions—and it’s just one small part of a vast landscape of photovoltaics cropping up all over the state.
Fifth Third
Plaza Renewal
Nashville, TN
Courtesy Gresham Smith
Size:
14,000 square feet
Completion:
2022
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Designed by KPF in 1986, the Fifth Third Center is a familiar fixture on the Nashville skyline—but at ground level, it was in serious need of a refresh. Gresham Smith came through with the new Fifth Third Plaza, a casual-cool public space that provides an engaging contrast to the highly formal tower behind it: lushly planted, fitted with all-wood seating and a shady arbor, the design provides the city’s bustling core with a human-scaled moment of calm.
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Lift Ev'ry Voice and
Sing Park
Jacksonville, FL
Courtesy Hood Design Studio
Size:
.75 acre
Completion:
Fall 2022
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Developing Parks and Trails
Often called the Black National Anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” was written in 1900 by James Weldon Johnson and put to music by his brother, John Rosamond Johnson. Designed by Hood Design Studio, this park, located at the brothers’ birthplace in Jacksonville, Florida, will celebrate their lives and achievements and document neighborhood history. When complete, the site will feature a small cottage inscribed with words from Johnson’s poems as well as an outdoor stage—transforming the humble shotgun house into a new mode of engaging with the community.
First Americans Museum
Oklahoma, OK
Size:
175,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy McNeesStudios
Designed by Los Angeles-based firm Johnson Fain, Oklahoma City’s First Americans Museum (FAM), managed by the nonprofit American Indian Cultural Center Foundation (AICCFF), opened in 2021 through a partnership between the State of Oklahoma, the City of Oklahoma City, and the Chickasaw Nation. The spiral-shaped design of the 175,000-square-foot building aims to represent the 39 Tribes of Oklahoma and includes a 4,000-square-foot FAM center and a 280-acre campus along the Oklahoma River, just opposite Downtown Oklahoma City.
The Point
Framework Plan
Draper, UT
Courtesy Mary Craven
Size:
600 acres
Completion:
N/A
Establishing Innovation Districts Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Designed to promote built-in flexibility, The Point Framework Plan, designed by SOM with the Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, makes use of market analysis, data gathering, and input from over 10,000 locals to guide future development of seven distinct districts in Draper, Utah. The live, work, play model will offer a mix of retail, entertainment, office, and commercial spaces. The plan also leverages Smart City technology to transform regional rail, transit, and road systems that will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists while reducing the need for cars. One-quarter of The Point has been preserved for trails, parks, and open space including a dog park and community gardens.
Railyard Park
Rogers, AR
Size:
5 acres
Completion:
2021
Courtesy Kate Joyce Studios
With a one million-dollar grant from the Walton Family Foundation, the city of Rogers, in Northwest Arkansas, engaged Ross Barney Architects to reimagine its historic downtown, which has long been bisected physically and economically by a rail line that runs from St. Louis to Chicago. A series of four public plazas (Frisco, Water, Playard and Butterfield Stage) knit the east and west sides of the tracks back together with amenities such as an outdoor performing arts venue, playground, dense plantings, and multi-use patios while honoring the city’s rail-centric history. Over 1,000 responses to a digital survey and multiple in-person charettes helped the architects understand and accommodate community priorities.
Miller Park
Chattanooga, TN
Size:
2.4 acres
Completion:
2018
Establishing Innovation Districts Developing Parks and Trails
Courtes Steve Pomberg
The undertaking reimagined a sunken plaza near downtown Chattanooga, Tennessee’s city hall as a privately-owned public greenspace and urban amenity. With site design by landscape architect Spackman Mossop Michaels and a performance pavilion by Eskew Dumez Ripple, the new park, along with its surrounding open spaces and streets, is a focal point of the city’s burgeoning downtown innovation district (a quarter mile area filled with offices and amenities specifically for tech, creative, and other knowledge workers), and hosts lively cultural events.
International African
American Museum
Charleston, SC
Courtesy PCF/Moody Nolan
Size:
41,800 square feet
Completion:
2023
Resurfacing Cultural Histories Developing Parks and Trails
Located on Gadsden’s Wharf, a site infamous as a disembarking site for roughly half the 10.7 million Africans forcibly shipped to North America during the Transatlantic slave trade, this 426-foot-long museum will allow visitors to explore cultures and knowledge systems those enslaved people brought with them. Designed by Pei Cobb Freed with Moody Nolan as architect of record, the one-story, brick-clad building will be perched 13 feet above the ground on columns to create a contemplative open space beneath it. Hood Design Studio’s landscape strategy, inspired by the tradition of ‘hush harbors’—landscapes where enslaved Africans would gather in secret to freely assemble—includes a sweet grass field and curving brick walls defining the edge.
Novus Innovation Center
Tempe, AZ
Size:
355 acres of land under development;
10 million square feet of mixed-use space
Completion:
2035
Establishing Innovation Districts
Introducing Ultrageen Policies
Courtesy Todd Photographic Services
A public/private partnership between Arizona State University (ASU) and Catellus Development Corporation, Novus Innovation Corridor is integrated with the university’s Tempe campus. The Gold LEED-Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) certified, mixed-use project is part of a broader university initiative to serve as a community center for entrepreneurship. Designed to drive economic growth by providing the community with access to university research, the development has attracted Fortune 100 corporations, medical research companies, start-ups, and maker businesses. With 4,100 residences, 700 hotel rooms, and 275,000 square feet of retail and entertainment venues, Novus is expected to bring nearly 34,000 new jobs and 5,000 new residents to the downtown Tempe area.
Courtesy Catellus Development Corporation
One Pratt Park
Pratt City, AL
Size:
8 acres
Completion:
2019
Developing Park and Trails, Prioritizing Resilience
Courtesy TLS Landscape Achitecture
In April 2011, a super cell EF4 tornado, one of the largest ever recorded, cleared a path over a mile wide and 80 miles long across Alabama and through Pratt City. Sitting in the former path of the tornado, FEMA-funded One Pratt Park was envisioned as the new heart of the restored community. TLS Landscape Architecture designed the eight-acre development with bright, optimistic colors, building a “living room” structure that opens to a green space for events and festivals, a hillside children’s playscape with natural slides, a rainwater collection system that irrigates a park stream, a hilltop signal tower, and an amphitheater for music performances and weddings.
Water Works Park
Minneapolis, MN
Transforming an abandoned 2.5-acre site in downtown Minneapolis into a welcoming public space, Water Works Park offers expansive views of the of the Mississippi River and features flexible outdoor space, plazas, seating, picnic lawns, native gardens, a play area, children’s garden, and bike and pedestrian paths. Landscape architect Damon Farber engaged with the community to honor the park’s location within the Saint Anthony Falls Historic District and its strong cultural connection to the Dakota people. The design team repurposed and rehabilitated historic mill walls, incorporated site features like steel gears, and installed narrative plaques that recognize the cultural and spiritual importance of the site for First Nations peoples.
Size:
2.5 acres
Completion:
May 2021
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Reusing Existing Structures
Courtesy Lane Pelovsky
Courtesy Corey Gaffer
Courtesy Corey Gaffer
Downtown Cary Park
Cary, NC
OJB and Machado Silvetti designed Downtown Cary Park, which balances active programming with a unique botanical experience. Showcasing plants native to North Carolina, the park is filled with shade gardens, perennial gardens, wetlands, pollinator gardens, and meadows. Weaving through the flora and taking advantage of the project’s change in elevation, raised walkways, winding paths, and water features connect a series of “outdoor rooms.” These include a children’s play environment designed for non-prescriptive play; the great lawn, a flexible gathering spot for community events and concerts; and a house and garden for special events.
Size:
7 acres
Completion:
Summer 2023
Developing Parks and Trails, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy OJB and Machado Silvetti
The Brewery District
Milwaukee, WI
Ten years after the closing of Milwaukee’s Pabst Brewery in 1996, late real estate developer and philanthropist Joseph J. Zilber purchased this seven-block site—including other historic buildings like an 1872 German Methodist church. Setting out to redevelop the area into Milwaukee’s next great neighborhood, Zilber created the Brewery Project LLC, the largest public-private partnership in the city’s history, rezoning the property from manufacturing to mixed use. Since initial work began, over $300 million has been invested in The Brewery complex. Now a LEED Platinum Neighborhood Development, it includes five apartment developments, a 400-bed luxury student residential property, three office buildings, two hotel properties, two breweries, three restaurants, and two private parking areas, and is the home of the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee’s School of Public Health.
Size:
20 acres
Completion:
2018
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy The Brewery District
Cortex Innovation Community
St. Louis, MO
More than twenty years since its inception, this sprawling tech-and-business campus on St. Louis’s south side is a model for innovation quarters around the country. What was once a neglected industrial zone is now a 200-acre job-making machine, with nearly three hundred companies employing 10,000-plus workers in fields like software development, bioscience, and manufacturing. Organized into separate sub-centers, and overseen by a dedicated non-profit organization, the compound—master planned by HOK—also boasts recreational and cultural amenities that have made it a boon to the surrounding community.
Courtesy Pete Vondelinde
Size:
4.5 million square feet
Completion:
Ongoing
(50 percent complete)
Establishing Innovation Districts
Olive West
Master Plan
St. Louis, MO
Olive West is an attempt to catalyze a housing renaissance in the heart of St. Louis. (Albeit, not a very affordable one.) On a small tract in the Covenant Blu Grand Center, local real estate company Owen Development has hired Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao to master plan a complex that will include 27 residential structures by a cavalcade of high-profile designers, including Boston’s Höweler + Yoon, New York’s MOS, and Mexico City’s Productora. The effort is aimed at attracting young creatives and other urbanites who might otherwise have migrated to larger Midwestern or coastal cities. For added appeal, Bilbao’s masterplan features communal and green spaces threaded delicately through the site.
Courtesy Tatiana Bilbao
Size:
3.3 acres
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
On Olive
St. Louis, MO
LA-based firm Michael Maltzan Architecture’s contribution to the Olive West scheme is emblematic of the development’s design-forward ambition. On a previously empty block, the 35-unit multifamily project comprises a pair of volumes with jagged, zig-zagging footprints that make their way around a landscaped central courtyard. Strikingly contemporary in outline, the design is also perfectly tuned to the scale and tempo of the surrounding fabric—a newcomer determined to get along with the neighbors.
Size:
32,400 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
Courtesy Michael Maltzan Architecture
Lucabe Coffee
Columbus, IN
Originally designed by late-modernist master Harry Weese, the little low-rise structure on Eastbrook Plaza in Columbus was built in 1961 as a bank. It remained so until 2020, then went tenant-less for a year until local entrepreneurs Alissa and Tyler Hodge came along. Overseeing the interior redesign themselves, the couple transformed the historic space into a bright, homey café, a hit with locals that preserves the midcentury structure while giving it a stylish, twenty-first century gloss.
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
Sixth Street Arts Alley
Columbus, IN
Right in the middle of downtown Columbus, the Sixth Street Arts Alley is the thin end of an ambitious urbanist wedge; a scheme to transform a portion of the city into a pedestrian paradise. Designed by Columbus-based firm LAA Office, the Alley looks to draw foot traffic by way of a colorful mural that covers not just the roadway but also—with an assist from artist Nick Smith—creeps up the walls of the surrounding buildings. Inviting street furniture, outdoor eateries, and year-round programming make the alley a lively hub.
Size:
10,000 square feet (mural)
Completion:
2021 (Phase 1)
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
Ivy Tech
Community College
Columbus, IN
San Francisco-based architects Iwamoto Scott have designed a new building for Ivy Tech Community College located within the AirPark Columbus College Campus—a unique cluster of three college institutions (Ivy Tech, Purdue Polytechnic, and Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus) with shared facilities designed KPF and Pelli Clarke Pelli, and a developing landscape plan by GGN. (Much of the project has been funded through grants from the local Cummins Foundation.) Ivy Tech’s white brick structure, incorporating exterior terraces, outdoor learning spaces, and carved-in apertures, is organized around a centrally-located social spine lit by three clerestory volumes. Its flexible, airy spaces are designed to promote community building and project-based learning. Completion is set for late this year.
Size:
80,000 square feet
Completion:
Late 2022
Establishing Innovation Districts
Exhibit Columbus
Columbus, IN
A highlight of Columbus’s culture calendar, Exhibit Columbus brings upwards of 30,000 visitors every other year to view site-specific installations, pop-ups pavilions, talks, film screenings and more, presented by a brace of up-and-coming local and international designers. (The organization hosts symposia in non-exhibition years.) Each installment of the show revolves around a central concept chosen by a notable curatorial team, and the public installations are sprinkled all over downtown and beyond, allowing the city’s unique architectural heritage to serve as a dramatic backdrop.
Size:
N/A
Completion:
Launched 2017, ongoing
Strategies for Transformation:
Resurfacing Cultural Histories, Instituting Bold Plans
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
With longtime cultural standbys like the Philbrook Museum (which opened a 75,000 -square-foot expansion in 2019) and the Gilcrease Museum (which just started work on a similar expansion this spring), the one-time center of America’s oil industry is finding new and innovative ways to fuel its future. One remarkable example: Tulsa Remote, an initiative funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is offering grants of $10,000 to workers from cities around the country able relocate to Tulsa. Launched in 2018, the program has continued to grow in the wake of the Covid epidemic, with more than 800 participants joining up last year. In 2019 the city launched the Aero system, a new bus rapid transit (BRT) line spanning the city from north to south, while Tulsa Transit continues to move forward on a micro-transit pilot concept that would allow Tulsans to hire public share-ride vans via a smartphone app. In a gratifying historical irony, the same industry (energy) that first brought the boom to Tulsa a century ago is still making waves, albeit now in a very different form: sustainable energy companies have been popping up all around town, forming lobbying and educational trade group the Tulsa Renewable Business Alliance to bring a carbon-free future to Oklahoma.
Tulsa, OK
Design Cities
Explore more Tulsa stories
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Black Wall Street History Center
/Greenwood Rising
Bob Dylan Center
Click on the projects below to read more
An American city of almost any size might consider itself lucky to have just a couple of works by a couple of architects of international note. But Columbus (pop. 48,000) already has dozens of them—an asset it’s been capitalizing on with a slew of programs aimed at driving cultural and economic activity. The seventy-plus major civic buildings by Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi and others (the legacy of local design-loving philanthropist J. Irwin Miller) are at the core of Envision Columbus, a new planning framework aimed at allowing the city to grow and change while preserving its remarkable architectural heritage. The city’s Redevelopment Department has been busy making portions of that broader vision come to life, with new projects ranging from riverside parks to a hotel and conference center that will help draw visitors to the historic downtown and to the larger metropolitan area. While always an easy sell for design buffs—bolstered by Exhibit Columbus, an annual event alternating symposia with site-specific installations, student projects, and more—Columbus is also making a concerted effort to attract culture vultures of all kinds: this year’s events include the All-Ford Car Show, the 25th-annual Scottish Festival, and the inaugural Beard and Mustache Competition.
Columbus, IN
Design Cities
Explore more Columbus stories
Exhibit Columbus
Ivy Tech
Community College
Lucabe Coffee
Click on the projects below to read more
Sixth Street
Arts Alley
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Developing Parks and Trails, Reusing Existing Structures Amplifying Downtown
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Designed to promote built-in flexibility, The Point Framework Plan, designed by SOM with the Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, makes use of market analysis, data gathering, and input from over 10,000 locals to guide future development of seven distinct districts in Draper, Utah. The live, work, play model will offer a mix of retail, entertainment, office, and commercial spaces. The plan also leverages Smart City technology to transform regional rail, transit, and road systems that will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists while reducing the need for cars. One-quarter of The Point has been preserved for trails, parks, and open space including a dog park and community gardens.
The Point Framework Plan
Draper, UT
Size:
600 acres
Completion:
N/A
Establishing Innovation Districts Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Tatiana Bilbao
Courtesy Tatiana Bilbao
Courtesy Rodrigo Chapa
Olive West is an attempt to catalyze a housing renaissance in the heart of St. Louis. (Albeit, not a very affordable one.) On a small tract in the Covenant Blu Grand Center, local real estate company Owen Development has hired Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao to master plan a complex that will include 27 residential structures by a cavalcade of high-profile designers, including Boston’s Höweler + Yoon, New York’s MOS, and Mexico City’s Productora. The effort is aimed at attracting young creatives and other urbanites who might otherwise have migrated to larger Midwestern or coastal cities. For added appeal, Bilbao’s masterplan features communal and green spaces threaded delicately through the site.
Olive West Master Plan
St. Louis, MO
Size:
3.3 acres
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
As a major component of its Green New Deal addressing climate change and racial injustice, Ithaca (population 30,715) recently became the first U.S. city to commit to electrifying and decarbonizing all of its buildings (That's 8,000 structures, with a deadline of 2030.) The city is amending its energy code to require new buildings to be net zero beginning in 2026, and is partnering with BlocPower, a tech company that specializes in retrofitting pre-existing buildings with sustainable technologies. The city received a grant from New York State to develop its plans and has secured significant investments from New York State Electric and Gas and private equity firm Alturus.
Ithaca Green New Deal
Ithaca, NY
Size:
N/A
Completion:
2030
Strategies for Transformation:
Ultragreen Development
Courtesy tk
Gene Leahy Mall
Omaha, NE
Size:
14.8 acres
Completion:
2022
Developing Park and Trails, Ampliying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Jeff Durkin
Sited in the heart of Downtown Omaha, Gene Leahy Mall is a key component of the city’s RiverFront development—three connected parks set to reinvigorate the urban core and enhance connections to the Missouri River. With financial support from the city of Omaha and local philanthropists like Warren Buffet, OJB and HDR have led a complete revamp of the 70’s era open space, reestablishing pedestrian access at street level, organizing uses around a large pond, and introducing vibrant furnishings and varied drought-tolerant trees and plantings. Its collection of spaces includes a central event lawn and performance pavilion, multi-use social spaces, sculpture garden, dog park, north/south promenade, children’s play area, interactive water feature, and a games area.
The Point
Framework Plan
Draper, UT
Designed to promote built-in flexibility, The Point Framework Plan, designed by SOM with the Point of the Mountain State Land Authority, makes use of market analysis, data gathering, and input from over 10,000 locals to guide future development of seven distinct districts in Draper, Utah. The live, work, play model will offer a mix of retail, entertainment, office, and commercial spaces. The plan also leverages Smart City technology to transform regional rail, transit, and road systems that will prioritize pedestrians and cyclists while reducing the need for cars. One-quarter of The Point has been preserved for trails, parks, and open space including a dog park and community gardens.
Courtesy Mary Craven
Size:
600 acres
Completion:
N/A
Establishing Innovation Districts Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Strategies for Transformation:
Olive West
Master Plan
St. Louis, MO
Olive West is an attempt to catalyze a housing renaissance in the heart of St. Louis. (Albeit, not a very affordable one.) On a small tract in the Covenant Blu Grand Center, local real estate company Owen Development has hired Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao to master plan a complex that will include 27 residential structures by a cavalcade of high-profile designers, including Boston’s Höweler + Yoon, New York’s MOS, and Mexico City’s Productora. The effort is aimed at attracting young creatives and other urbanites who might otherwise have migrated to larger Midwestern or coastal cities. For added appeal, Bilbao’s masterplan features communal and green spaces threaded delicately through the site.
Courtesy Tatiana Bilbao
Size:
3.3 acres
Completion:
N/A
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
As a major component of its Green New Deal addressing climate change and racial injustice, Ithaca (population 30,715) recently became the first U.S. city to commit to electrifying and decarbonizing all of its buildings (That's 8,000 structures, with a deadline of 2030.) The city is amending its energy code to require new buildings to be net zero beginning in 2026, and is partnering with BlocPower, a tech company that specializes in retrofitting pre-existing buildings with sustainable technologies. The city received a grant from New York State to develop its plans and has secured significant investments from New York State Electric and Gas and private equity firm Alturus.
Ithaca Green New Deal
Ithaca, NY
Size:
N/A
Completion:
2030
Ultragreen Development
Strategies for Transformation:
The country music capital of the world is seemingly a little less honky-tonk these days. A major drive of that shift has been the entertainment industry—big Hollywood players like casting giant Endeavor (formerly William Morris) have been expanding their staff and office space, and next year will see the opening of the new 47-acre Music City Studios, a state-of-the-art recording and performance complex in suburban Henderson. With a near 15% population boom since 2010, and home prices soaring an astonishing 25% in just the last year, the challenge facing the city now is where to put all of the new Nashvillians. Mayor John Cooper has been leading the charge for more below-market development, and already this year two new low-income projects, 900 Dickerson Park and 900 Cleveland Park, have broken ground, while Amazon has lately pledged $10.6 million to build more worker housing. While the city may be getting more sophisticated, its down-home soul remains very much intact. In the old industrial district of Wedgewood Houston, the new outpost from international hospitality brand Soho House features country-music performers every night. In Germantown, the bartenders at The Optimist can do international-style mixology, but they’re just as happy pouring straight whiskey.
Nashville, TN
Design Cities
Nashville Warehouse Company
Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Peabody Union
Fifth Third Plaza Renewal
Nashville Public Library / 225 Polk
Click on the projects below to read more
Explore more Nashville stories
An American city of almost any size might consider itself lucky to have just a couple of works by a couple of architects of international note. But Columbus (pop. 48,000) already has dozens of them—an asset it’s been capitalizing on with a slew of programs aimed at driving cultural and economic activity. The seventy-plus major civic buildings by Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi and others (the legacy of local design-loving philanthropist J. Irwin Miller) are at the core of Envision Columbus, a new planning framework aimed at allowing the city to grow and change while preserving its remarkable architectural heritage. The city’s Redevelopment Department has been busy making portions of that broader vision come to life, with new projects ranging from riverside parks to a hotel and conference center that will help draw visitors to the historic downtown and to the larger metropolitan area. While always an easy sell for design buffs—bolstered by Exhibit Columbus, an annual event alternating symposia with site-specific installations, student projects, and more—Columbus is also making a concerted effort to attract culture vultures of all kinds: this year’s events include the All-Ford Car Show, the 25th-annual Scottish Festival, and the inaugural Beard and Mustache Competition.
Columbus, IN
Design Cities
Sixth Street Arts Alley
Exhibit Columbus
Ivy Tech
Community College
Lucabe Coffee
Click on the projects below to read more
Explore more Columbus stories
With longtime cultural standbys like the Philbrook Museum (which opened a 75,000 -square-foot expansion in 2019) and the Gilcrease Museum (which just started work on a similar expansion this spring), the one-time center of America’s oil industry is finding new and innovative ways to fuel its future. One remarkable example: Tulsa Remote, an initiative funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is offering grants of $10,000 to workers from cities around the country able relocate to Tulsa. Launched in 2018, the program has continued to grow in the wake of the Covid epidemic, with more than 800 participants joining up last year. In 2019 the city launched the Aero system, a new bus rapid transit (BRT) line spanning the city from north to south, while Tulsa Transit continues to move forward on a micro-transit pilot concept that would allow Tulsans to hire public share-ride vans via a smartphone app. In a gratifying historical irony, the same industry (energy) that first brought the boom to Tulsa a century ago is still making waves, albeit now in a very different form: sustainable energy companies have been popping up all around town, forming lobbying and educational trade group the Tulsa Renewable Business Alliance to bring a carbon-free future to Oklahoma.
Tulsa, OK
Design Cities
Click on the projects below to read more
Explore more Tulsa stories
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Bob Dylan Center
Black Wall Street History Center
/Greenwood Rising
Political agitator, social outcast, Christian convert: songwriter Robert Allen Zimmerman, AKA Bob Dylan, has always been remaking himself, providing plenty of fodder for the new museum in Tulsa that bears his (more familiar) name. Designed by architects Olson Kundig, the center boasts a collection of over 100,000 items tracking the artist’s protean career; its Oklahoman locale seems only fitting, situating Dylan’s life and work in the landscape that has always filled his music: the American heartland. The project represents a major win for the city and for the George Kaiser Foundation, the philanthropic organization that fought to bring Dylan's archive to the city as part of a major downtown redevelopment scheme.
Bob Dylan Center
Tulsa, OK
Size:
29,000 square feet
Completion:
Spring 2022
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Matthew Millman
Just steps from Greenwood Rising, the Cultural Center is the traditional focal point of the local African-American community, playing host to public events, youth groups, educational programming and more. With private sources footing the $9 million cost, the facility will shortly get an extensive overhaul. Collaborators Moody Nolan and JCJ Architecture were recently announced as the project’s designers. (The choice is especially apt: Moody Nolan is the country’s largest African-American led office.)
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Tulsa, OK
Size:
10,000 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy tk
On the historic east side of downtown Tulsa, Greenwood Rising commemorates the 1921 massacre when vicious race riots tore through the city and destroyed what had been a thriving African-American commercial district located on the very site of the museum itself. The structure, designed by hometown office Selser Schaefer Architects, is a suitably somber composition, but in a cool, modern idiom that looks to the area’s promising future while acknowledging its tragic past.
Black Wall Street History Center/Greenwood Rising
Tulsa, OK
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Melissa Lukenbaugh
Originally designed by late-modernist master Harry Weese, the little low-rise structure on Eastbrook Plaza in Columbus was built in 1961 as a bank. It remained so until 2020, then went tenant-less for a year until local entrepreneurs Alissa and Tyler Hodge came along. Overseeing the interior redesign themselves, the couple transformed the historic space into a bright, homey café, a hit with locals that preserves the midcentury structure while giving it a stylish, twenty-first century gloss.
Lucabe Coffee
Columbus, IN
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Reusing Existing Structures
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
Right in the middle of downtown Columbus, the Sixth Street Arts Alley is the thin end of an ambitious urbanist wedge; a scheme to transform a portion of the city into a pedestrian paradise. Designed by Columbus-based firm LAA Office, the Alley looks to draw foot traffic by way of a colorful mural that covers not just the roadway but also—with an assist from artist Nick Smith—creeps up the walls of the surrounding buildings. Inviting street furniture, outdoor eateries, and year-round programming make the alley a lively hub.
Sixth Street Arts Alley
Columbus, IN
Size:
10,000 square feet (mural)
Completion:
2021 (Phase 1)
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
A highlight of Columbus’s culture calendar, Exhibit Columbus brings upwards of 30,000 visitors every other year to view site-specific installations, pop-ups pavilions, talks, film screenings and more, presented by a brace of up-and-coming local and international designers. (The organization hosts symposia in non-exhibition years.) Each installment of the show revolves around a central concept chosen by a notable curatorial team, and the public installations are sprinkled all over downtown and beyond, allowing the city’s unique architectural heritage to serve as a dramatic backdrop.
Exhibit Columbus
Columbus, IN
Size:
N/A
Completion:
Launched 2017, ongoing
Resurfacing Cultural Histories, Instituting Bold Plans
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
San Francisco-based architects Iwamoto Scott have designed a new building for Ivy Tech Community College located within the AirPark Columbus College Campus—a unique cluster of three college institutions (Ivy Tech, Purdue Polytechnic, and Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus) with shared facilities designed KPF and Pelli Clarke Pelli, and a developing landscape plan by GGN. (Much of the project has been funded through grants from the local Cummins Foundation.) Ivy Tech’s white brick structure, incorporating exterior terraces, outdoor learning spaces, and carved-in apertures, is organized around a centrally-located social spine lit by three clerestory volumes. Its flexible, airy spaces are designed to promote community building and project-based learning. Completion is set for late this year.
Ivy Tech Community College, Columbus Campus
Columbus, IN
Size:
80,000 square feet
Completion:
Late 2022
Establishing Innovation Districts
Strategies for Transformation:
Designed by KPF in 1986, the Fifth Third Center is a familiar fixture on the Nashville skyline—but at ground level, it was in serious need of a refresh. Gresham Smith came through with the new Fifth Third Plaza, a casual-cool public space that provides an engaging contrast to the highly formal tower behind it: lushly planted, fitted with all-wood seating and a shady arbor, the design provides the city’s bustling core with a human-scaled moment of calm.
Fifth Third Plaza Renewal
Nashville, TN
Size:
14,000 square feet
Completion:
2022
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Gresham Smith
With Nashville’s municipal government committed to moving toward a 100 percent renewable energy supply, the groundbreaking earlier this year of the Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative in nearby Shelbyville represents a major leap forward. The 370-acre solar farm, launched in tandem with famed public utility the Tennessee Valley Authority and private company Solar Ranch, will offset 70 percent of Vanderbilt University’s annual carbon emissions—and it’s just one small part of a vast landscape of photovoltaics cropping up all over the state.
Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Nashville, TN
Size:
14,000 square feet, 370.5 acres
Completion:
Late 2022
Instituting Bold Plans
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy tk
Emblematic of the region’s ongoing transformation is the Nashville Warehouse Company, which brings 200,000 square feet of office space to the once-thinly peopled industrial district of Wedgewood Houston. Complemented by expansive greenspace and an outdoor performance venue, the buildings from Chicago-based office Hartshorne Plunkard are constructed of mass timber—the first such project in Nashville. It’s a suitably innovative solution for a development meant to signal Nashville’s new economic direction. The design from Chicago-based office Hartshorne Plunkard deploys mass timber—the first such project in Nashville. It’s a suitably innovative solution for a development meant to signal Nashville’s new economic direction.
Nashville Warehouse Company
Nashville, TN
Size:
200,000 square feet; 5.2 acres
Completion:
2021
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Mary Craven
Perhaps no single area in Nashville is poised for more dramatic change than the long-neglected eastern shore of the Cumberland River. The formerly industrial area is now slated to become a thriving live-work district filled with public space. The Peabody Union project from Nashville’s own office Hastings Architecture provides a foretaste of the area’s future: a massive mixed-use complex, the development will feature a landscaped public corridor running clear through it, connecting the waterfront to the fast-growing commercial district further inland. The ensemble’s tough, ruddy exterior is a keen reminder of the past, echoing the look of the still-standing trolley barns next door.
Peabody Union
Nashville, TN
Size:
755,000 square feet
Completion:
2024
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy HASTINGS
Designed by Bruce Crabtree in 1965, the former crown jewel of the Nashville Public Library system sat vacant for sixteen years after its original tenants left in 2001. It finally found one in local firm Hastings Architecture, who transformed it into 225 Polk, an office space (now partially occupied by the firm itself), with a public-programming component, The Athenaeum, capable of hosting up to 300 people for meetings, lectures, town halls and more. Rehabilitating the structure to its midcentury glory, the design team also opened it up, glazing previously walled-in section of the exterior to make the building feel truly a part of the city.
Nashville Public Library
/ 225 Polk
Nashville, TN
Size:
42,000 square feet
Completion:
2020
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy HASTINGS
The country music capital of the world is seemingly a little less honky-tonk these days. A major drive of that shift has been the entertainment industry—big Hollywood players like casting giant Endeavor (formerly William Morris) have been expanding their staff and office space, and next year will see the opening of the new 47-acre Music City Studios, a state-of-the-art recording and performance complex in suburban Henderson. With a near 15% population boom since 2010, and home prices soaring an astonishing 25% in just the last year, the challenge facing the city now is where to put all of the new Nashvillians. Mayor John Cooper has been leading the charge for more below-market development, and already this year two new low-income projects, 900 Dickerson Park and 900 Cleveland Park, have broken ground, while Amazon has lately pledged $10.6 million to build more worker housing. While the city may be getting more sophisticated, its down-home soul remains very much intact. In the old industrial district of Wedgewood Houston, the new outpost from international hospitality brand Soho House features country-music performers every night. In Germantown, the bartenders at The Optimist can do international-style mixology, but they’re just as happy pouring straight whiskey.
Nashville, TN
Design Cities
Explore more Nashville stories
Peabody Union
Fifth Third Plaza Renewal
Nashville Public Library / 225 Polk
Nashville Warehouse Company
Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Click on the projects below to read more
With longtime cultural standbys like the Philbrook Museum (which opened a 75,000 -square-foot expansion in 2019) and the Gilcrease Museum (which just started work on a similar expansion this spring), the one-time center of America’s oil industry is finding new and innovative ways to fuel its future. One remarkable example: Tulsa Remote, an initiative funded by the George Kaiser Family Foundation, is offering grants of $10,000 to workers from cities around the country able relocate to Tulsa. Launched in 2018, the program has continued to grow in the wake of the Covid epidemic, with more than 800 participants joining up last year. In 2019 the city launched the Aero system, a new bus rapid transit (BRT) line spanning the city from north to south, while Tulsa Transit continues to move forward on a micro-transit pilot concept that would allow Tulsans to hire public share-ride vans via a smartphone app. In a gratifying historical irony, the same industry (energy) that first brought the boom to Tulsa a century ago is still making waves, albeit now in a very different form: sustainable energy companies have been popping up all around town, forming lobbying and educational trade group the Tulsa Renewable Business Alliance to bring a carbon-free future to Oklahoma.
Tulsa, OK
Design Cities
Explore more Tulsa stories
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Black Wall Street History Center
/Greenwood Rising
Bob Dylan Center
Click on the projects below to read more
An American city of almost any size might consider itself lucky to have just a couple of works by a couple of architects of international note. But Columbus (pop. 48,000) already has dozens of them—an asset it’s been capitalizing on with a slew of programs aimed at driving cultural and economic activity. The seventy-plus major civic buildings by Eero Saarinen, Robert Venturi and others (the legacy of local design-loving philanthropist J. Irwin Miller) are at the core of Envision Columbus, a new planning framework aimed at allowing the city to grow and change while preserving its remarkable architectural heritage. The city’s Redevelopment Department has been busy making portions of that broader vision come to life, with new projects ranging from riverside parks to a hotel and conference center that will help draw visitors to the historic downtown and to the larger metropolitan area. While always an easy sell for design buffs—bolstered by Exhibit Columbus, an annual event alternating symposia with site-specific installations, student projects, and more—Columbus is also making a concerted effort to attract culture vultures of all kinds: this year’s events include the All-Ford Car Show, the 25th-annual Scottish Festival, and the inaugural Beard and Mustache Competition.
Columbus, IN
Design Cities
Explore more Columbus stories
Sixth Street
Arts Alley
Exhibit Columbus
Ivy Tech
Community College
Lucabe Coffee
Click on the projects below to read more
On the historic east side of downtown Tulsa, Greenwood Rising commemorates the 1921 massacre when vicious race riots tore through the city and destroyed what had been a thriving African-American commercial district located on the very site of the museum itself. The structure, designed by hometown office Selser Schaefer Architects, is a suitably somber composition, but in a cool, modern idiom that looks to the area’s promising future while acknowledging its tragic past.
Courtesy Melissa Lukenbaugh
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Strategies for Transformation:
Black Wall Street
History Center/
Greenwood Rising
Tulsa, OK
Just steps from Greenwood Rising, the Cultural Center is the traditional focal point of the local African-American community, playing host to public events, youth groups, educational programming and more. With private sources footing the $9 million cost, the facility will shortly get an extensive overhaul. Collaborators Moody Nolan and JCJ Architecture were recently announced as the project’s designers. (The choice is especially apt: Moody Nolan is the country’s largest African-American led office.)
Courtesy Melissa Lukenbaugh
Size:
10,000 square feet
Completion:
N/A
Resurfacing Cultural Histories
Strategies for Transformation:
Greenwood Cultural Center Renovation
Tulsa, OK
Political agitator, social outcast, Christian convert: songwriter Robert Allen Zimmerman, AKA Bob Dylan, has always been remaking himself, providing plenty of fodder for the new museum in Tulsa that bears his (more familiar) name. Designed by architects Olson Kundig, the center boasts a collection of over 100,000 items tracking the artist’s protean career; its Oklahoman locale seems only fitting, situating Dylan’s life and work in the landscape that has always filled his music: the American heartland. The project represents a major win for the city and for the George Kaiser Foundation, the philanthropic organization that fought to bring Dylan's archive to the city as part of a major downtown redevelopment scheme.
Bob Dylan Center
Tulsa, OK
Size:
19.4 acres
Completion:
Fall 2022
Developing Parks and Trails, Prioritizing Resilience
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Matthew Millman
Nashville Public Library
/ 225 Polk
Nashville, TN
Designed by Bruce Crabtree in 1965, the former crown jewel of the Nashville Public Library system sat vacant for sixteen years after its original tenants left in 2001. It finally found one in local firm Hastings Architecture, who transformed it into 225 Polk, an office space (now partially occupied by the firm itself), with a public-programming component, The Athenaeum, capable of hosting up to 300 people for meetings, lectures, town halls and more. Rehabilitating the structure to its midcentury glory, the design team also opened it up, glazing previously walled-in section of the exterior to make the building feel truly a part of the city.
Courtesy HASTINGS
Size:
42,000 square feet
Completion:
2020
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Peabody Union
Nashville, TN
Perhaps no single area in Nashville is poised for more dramatic change than the long-neglected eastern shore of the Cumberland River. The formerly industrial area is now slated to become a thriving live-work district filled with public space. The Peabody Union project from Nashville’s own office Hastings Architecture provides a foretaste of the area’s future: a massive mixed-use complex, the development will feature a landscaped public corridor running clear through it, connecting the waterfront to the fast-growing commercial district further inland. The ensemble’s tough, ruddy exterior is a keen reminder of the past, echoing the look of the still-standing trolley barns next door.
Size:
755,000 square feet
Completion:
2024
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy HASTINGS
Nashville Warehouse
Company
Nashville, TN
Emblematic of the region’s ongoing transformation is the Nashville Warehouse Company, which brings 200,000 square feet of office space to the once-thinly peopled industrial district of Wedgewood Houston. Complemented by expansive greenspace and an outdoor performance venue, the buildings from Chicago-based office Hartshorne Plunkard are constructed of mass timber—the first such project in Nashville. It’s a suitably innovative solution for a development meant to signal Nashville’s new economic direction. The design from Chicago-based office Hartshorne Plunkard deploys mass timber—the first such project in Nashville. It’s a suitably innovative solution for a development meant to signal Nashville’s new economic direction.
Courtesy Mary Craven
Size:
200,000 square feet; 5.2 acres
Completion:
2021
Introducing Ultragreen Policies
Strategies for Transformation:
Nashville Vanderbilt Solar Initiative
Nashville, TN
With Nashville’s municipal government committed to moving toward a 100 percent renewable energy supply, the groundbreaking earlier this year of the Nashville-Vanderbilt Solar Initiative in nearby Shelbyville represents a major leap forward. The 370-acre solar farm, launched in tandem with famed public utility the Tennessee Valley Authority and private company Solar Ranch, will offset 70 percent of Vanderbilt University’s annual carbon emissions—and it’s just one small part of a vast landscape of photovoltaics cropping up all over the state.
Courtesy Mary Craven
Size:
14,000 square feet; 370.5 acres
Completion:
Late 2022
Instituting Bold Plans
Strategies for Transformation:
Fifth Third
Plaza Renewal
Nashville, TN
Designed by KPF in 1986, the Fifth Third Center is a familiar fixture on the Nashville skyline—but at ground level, it was in serious need of a refresh. Gresham Smith came through with the new Fifth Third Plaza, a casual-cool public space that provides an engaging contrast to the highly formal tower behind it: lushly planted, fitted with all-wood seating and a shady arbor, the design provides the city’s bustling core with a human-scaled moment of calm.
Courtesy Gresham Smith
Size:
14,000 square feet
Completion:
2022
Reusing Existing Structures, Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Lucabe Coffee
Columbus, IN
Originally designed by late-modernist master Harry Weese, the little low-rise structure on Eastbrook Plaza in Columbus was built in 1961 as a bank. It remained so until 2020, then went tenant-less for a year until local entrepreneurs Alissa and Tyler Hodge came along. Overseeing the interior redesign themselves, the couple transformed the historic space into a bright, homey café, a hit with locals that preserves the midcentury structure while giving it a stylish, twenty-first century gloss.
Size:
5,000 square feet
Completion:
2021
Reusing Existing Structures
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
Sixth Street Arts Alley
Columbus, IN
Right in the middle of downtown Columbus, the Sixth Street Arts Alley is the thin end of an ambitious urbanist wedge; a scheme to transform a portion of the city into a pedestrian paradise. Designed by Columbus-based firm LAA Office, the Alley looks to draw foot traffic by way of a colorful mural that covers not just the roadway but also—with an assist from artist Nick Smith—creeps up the walls of the surrounding buildings. Inviting street furniture, outdoor eateries, and year-round programming make the alley a lively hub.
Size:
10,000 square feet (mural)
Completion:
2021 (Phase 1)
Amplifying Downtown
Strategies for Transformation:
Courtesy Hadley Fruits
Ivy Tech
Community College
Columbus, IN
San Francisco-based architects Iwamoto Scott have designed a new building for Ivy Tech Community College located within the AirPark Columbus College Campus—a unique cluster of three college institutions (Ivy Tech, Purdue Polytechnic, and Indiana University-Purdue University Columbus) with shared facilities designed KPF and Pelli Clarke Pelli, and a developing landscape plan by GGN. (Much of the project has been funded through grants from the local Cummins Foundation.) Ivy Tech’s white brick structure, incorporating exterior terraces, outdoor learning spaces, and carved-in apertures, is organized around a centrally-located social spine lit by three clerestory volumes. Its flexible, airy spaces are designed to promote community building and project-based learning. Completion is set for late this year.
Size:
80,000 square feet
Completion:
Late 2022
Strategies for Transformation:
Establishing Innovation Districts
Exhibit Columbus
Columbus, IN
A highlight of Columbus’s culture calendar, Exhibit Columbus brings upwards of 30,000 visitors every other year to view site-specific installations, pop-ups pavilions, talks, film screenings and more, presented by a brace of up-and-coming local and international designers. (The organization hosts symposia in non-exhibition years.) Each installment of the show revolves around a central concept chosen by a notable curatorial team, and the public installations are sprinkled all over downtown and beyond, allowing the city’s unique architectural heritage to serve as a dramatic backdrop.
Size:
N/A
Completion:
Launched 2017, ongoing
Strategies for Transformation:
Resurfacing Cultural Histories, Instituting Bold Plans
Courtesy Hadley Fruits