Counter Proposal: The Johnny Harris Site

The Johnny Harris Site

a counter proposal 

Eric S. Brown, author

A New Urban Proposal  

The current site of the Johnny Harris restaurant and surrounding properties have been proposed for a new development.  That proposed development isn't totally clear, but the general use is large format or “big box” retail along with tearing down the 1936 Johnny Harris building.  Brown Design Studio, an architectural and urban design firm, has prepared a counter proposal for this site.  

The purpose of the counter proposal is to show a better method of urban planning that is more in keeping with the nature and character of Savannah.  The hope is that this counter proposal raises the bar of discussion about how, why and where Savannah grows and what those development patterns are.  The methods used show the possibility of development patterns that are healthier, more sustainable, more walkable, more beautiful and make much better financial sense for all parties involved.  

The Typical Conventional Suburban Design Pattern: 

The current site is composed of assembled properties that included the loved 1936 Johnny Harris restaurant.  A conventional suburban style auto oriented strip mall approach to the site will yield some where around 100,000 sq.ft. of big box retail along with a conventional out parcel on Victory Drive that is typically a fast food chain.  The formula here is really just a function of how much parking can be accommodated in the most efficient format with the large “sea of parking” being the standard result.   

This type of development is out of character with this portion of the City of Savannah and belongs else where in the City or County.  While the current site is not being used to its highest and best use, the suburban approach is short sighed and destructive to the patterns of the adjacent neighborhoods.  Things like this contribute nothing to the character of a City, neighborhood or place, in fact, they often remove those things.  

The Mixed Use Urban Design Pattern:

The counter proposal response is based on three main principals that create great places; 1) Creating a Civic Public Realm, 2) Mixed Use walkability 3) Beauty.  These three things are part of what makes the City of Savannah such a special place and the premise of this proposal is that all development in the City should have the same qualities.  Communities, neighborhoods or even infill areas that have these qualities are the largest trend in real estate right now.  Cities like Atlanta are building these neighborhoods inside the City because the people or market prefer that over conventional suburban development.   

The Civic realm starts with making great streets.  Savannah has great streets so this is easy, just copy what works.  Great streets support people, bikes and cars and they do it through good design that accomplishes those three things while also allowing for Beauty, such as street trees.  Street parking is natural and is used to soak up cars that would other wise be clustered in the big sea of parking.  Typically the street pattern, a grid in this case, allows multiple ways in and out as well as easy access for emergency vehicles.  Another part of the Civic nature of streets is the activity that happens on them.  The proposed commercial buildings are close to the street, like much of downtown, that allows for window shopping and outdoor seating areas.  Lastly, the Civic realm here is shown with a small square that is in the center of the property.  This square serves as the anchor for the new neighborhood.  It is both a visual break from buildings and a place to gather and have functions.  

Mixed Use walkable neighborhoods are the hottest trend in real estate today.  The walkable aspect is important to people for living as well as working and playing.  This particular site is a great site as it actually has easy walking distance to Daffin Park, a trail system linkage and the retail area adjacent, including a Whole Foods.  People tend to not walk if the environment isn't conducive to walking so again, you have to get the design right for that to work.  One of the advantages of building walkable communities vs. conventional development is that the need for vehicular trips per day drops, thus taking away some of the additional auto traffic pressure and also lessening the needed parking requirements.  

The Mixed use portion is simply just trying to use the site to its highest and best use.  The proposal shows a wide mix of uses and building types.  First, the Johnny Harris Building itself is shown saved in it current location.  Smaller scale commercial buildings are shown in the front half of the site nearest Victory Drive.  These could be one to three story buildings, very much in keeping with the scale of most of Savannah, that have retail or commercial on the ground level and residential or office space above.  The southern portion of the site is divided into two portions.  The first shows a series of Savannah style row houses, each with a garage and private courtyard.  Garage apartments could add to new affordable housing.  The other portion of the site shows a small scale apartment complex.  The complex uses small three story buildings that engage the street with some shared parking in the rear.  

The proposal seeks to show diversity in building types but this mix can always be changed as needed.  For instance, you could replace the apartments and townhouse with large format retail of 40-50,000 sqft. and still retain most of the character shown here. My office has worked on these type of developments bringing national retailers into walkable urban places.  We have worked with Publix, Walmart and others.  There are many examples of this in Atlanta, Charleston and Charolette to name a few.  Many national retailers actually are actually seeking these types of developments and have developed prototypes that are smaller and plug in to this urban grid format.  

How to make this Beautiful too?  Building Beauty comes from design and proportion which doesn't have to always cost more, in fact, many times it actually is cheaper if done right.  This proposal shows timeless Beauty in the form of great streets that are proportioned in the proper scale with the buildings that frame them.  The landscape is Beauty as it saves the larger oaks on the property and then adds new urban landscape that will get better over time, just like downtown has done.  The buildings are Beautiful not because they use expensive materials but because they are well proportioned, relate to human scale and use authentic Savannah materials.  The roof lines and scale are the composition tools taken from 300 years of Savannah building fabric. 

Summary: 

The Johnny Harris site is part of the core portion of the City of Savannah, just inside the Truman Parkway.  It is along one of the City’s main streets, beautiful Victory Drive.  It is adjacent to an established neighborhood with a clear urban grid and pattern of development.  The site should be designed just as the rest of the City of Savannah was designed pre-1940.  Building additional suburban sprawl with in the fabric of the City just doesn't make any sense.  Build suburban in the suburbs but build for people in the City.  

This counter proposal shows how to accommodate a better mix of uses, people and places than a singular auto oriented use.  It shows how to incorporate the urban patterns of Savannah into new development and it shows how to grow the City of Savannah with out letting it become suburban Atlanta as it does so.  All of the things show have been accomplished in many many places across the county so nothing presented here is groundbreaking on a national level. 

The financial impart of this is interesting.  A conventional approach yields investment around $10M for this property.  That approach brings a few dozen low paying jobs, high traffic and sales tax on the retail.  The counter proposal brings about $16-18M of investment for the property.  That yields higher property tax base, a similar amount of low paying jobs, less amount of traffic and adds new housing units of all price ranges.  Those new residences pay income taxes as well. Letting this prime site, in a core part of the City, be used for single use suburban retail is short sighted financially, the mixed use complex is a higher an better use by any measure of financials. 

Saving the Johnny Harris Building would be a great thing for Savannah.  The cultural impact of the building and the restaurant over the last 75+ years has been remarkable to learn about.  This proposal does save that building and lets it connect to the rest of the development in a meaningful way.  The building could continue as a restaurant or it could be part of something else like a park pavilion or another private use.  Whether the building stays or not, however, the key point to take away from this counter proposal would be that the building could easily be accommodated because of the finer grain approach to design, the street network and the scale of the new buildings.  

Book Review: Why I Walk: Taking a Step in the Right Direction by Kevin Klinkenberg 2014.

Book Review:  Why I Walk; Taking a Step in the Right Direction by Kevin Klinkenberg 2014.  

Why I Walk is a recent book by Kevin Klinkenberg.  Kevin is an urbanist, architect and planner who has been helping to create vibrant walkable places.  In his book, Kevin compares walking as a primary lifestyle to choosing to live a more automobile oriented lifestyle.  This is a great approach as the idea of choosing to live in a walkable environment is still foreign to some people.  

Kevin thoughtfully explains the many reasons for choosing a walkable lifestyle: Financial, Freedom, Health and Social. These show how freeing yourself from the daily need of a car can improve your lifestyle in ways you may not have expected.  People are so used to sitting in heavy traffic for 60 minutes each day that they forget that they have a choice and that there are alternatives.  What if you walked 7500 steps a day just going to work?  Your body would be in much better shape even before you hit the gym after work.  What if you put a car payment into a great house in a great neighborhood and rode a bike to work?  

Kevin helps the reader to imagine things differently from the old school, post World War 2 suburban dream, which has grown into something more resembling a nightmare in many places.  The millennial generation is the first to see a decline in automobile ownership. They are choosing instead to live in walkable urban places. And it's not just the young who prefer this approach. One of the hottest trends in senior care is creating or integrating with walkable urban neighborhoods for new projects.  Seniors generally cite freedom and social engagement as the leading characteristics that appeal to them in urban projects, just as Kevin describes.

The overall tone of the book is one of a humanistic explanation of why you would want to walk and how that will affect your life.  Kevin relies on both facts and figures and creative anecdotes from his own life and fairly addresses the challenges of walking (like rain!).  

Having just made the choice last year to relocate our office and myself into the core of historic Savannah, I can relate on a personal level to Kevin’s book.  Why I Walk is spot on in showing how a predominantly walking lifestyle can change the very nature of your life for the better.  I highly recommend this book to everyone, but especially to people who are designing or planning walkable communities, but who do not adopt that lifestyle and experience the benefits themselves.  Why I Walk is a great addition to everyone’s library. Also, check out Kevin’s website and blog, which is full of good stuff, at  www.kevinklinkenberg.com 

What to do with a Cul-de-sac?

One of our biggest challenges is to deal with the sheer amount of suburban repair work needed. 50+ years of suburban investment with the most world's most prolific economic engine means that there is much work to undo.

Post real estate melt-down, many of our commissions have been focused on this type of repair work. In many cases, it is much like the power went off and simply left half finished developments lying about. Our goal is to try to repair these areas as best we can and set them up to grow into a type of meaningful place. This begins by tackling the process of transformation of the ever common cul-de-sac.

Ironically, or perhaps not so much so, the word cul-de-sac means "bottom of the bag" in French. So the bottom of the bag in this case, gets you the residential equivalent of a fast food drive through, easy for cars but bad for humans.

Our case study example here looks much like a typical bottom of the bag below but with a slight "upgrade" of a green space in the middle as a feature. Also, as a more advanced version of the cul-de-sac, it actually has alley ways feeding some of the lots.

That little green circle is nicer than pure concrete or asphalt, but does little on its own. The lot structure is still driving the form of the house placement and you will still end up with something like the next photo, a nicer bottom of the bag.

What to do? Well, in many of these types of repair projects, we have many limitations of what we can do. Often, our project is already entitled or zoned and the client does not wish to go back into that arena. Other times, much of the actual infrastructure is already in as is the case here.

Our one solution was to begin to define the former bottom of the bag into a multi-use place. Cars use this place but also kids, bikes and humans in general. It becomes a place that social things happen in as well a a simply visually pleasing space.

Here we use three basic techniques:

1. Make a place beautiful. Places that are not visually appealing are not valued as highly as other places. Here we add a squared up center green with a large oak tree planting (and other small details such as lighting etc.)

2. Define the place (space): A place must be defined or enclosed in some manner. Here we focus moving the building form and mass around to create walls for our new space. Same number of houses, just moved them around to create something of value.

3. Approach of the space: This is the one that most designers overlook. Every interesting space has some type of approach to it. Here we use a row of palmetto trees to create a tighter street section and rhythm that then opens up to the main space.

Simple fix that costs very little in terms of actual costs. We also kept existing utility runs and really only changed some lot lines, house placement and a few ornamental design moves inside the right of way.

As an alternate, we also looked at another version here. This is a more involved approach as we moved the right of way a little and actually carved out a small block structure in the former cul-de-sac parcel. Our main goal here was to generate more value by fronting our homes on a more controlled common green vs. a less desirable suburban second tier arterial road.

We used the same basic principals as above but just modified the plan so that 8 of the 12 homes faced the value generating space vs. 4 in the other example. Since this is a real world project, our client and design team will now have to weigh out the extra value generated in sales of our approach vs. the extra design and engineering needed to convert to this scheme. Our earlier example, needed almost no additional engineering or approvals.

There is hope to punch out of the bottom of the bag. Breaking the cul-de-sac is easy to do from the point of view of a designer of real world solutions to this large problem. Here, remember that our three main principals; Beautiful Places, Defined Places and Anticipation of a Place were used to build extra value out of typical suburban post melt down wreckage.

Carlton Landing, Oklahoma Progress

More exciting progress on the construction of our first five units at Carlton Landing. The first four are a cluster of courtyard, rear yard and duplex units that operate over a common semi-public space. See here http://browndesignstudio.blogspot.com/2011/01/carlton-landing.html
for an earlier post and site plan. Very advanced block and unit design.

Rearyard unit on right that terminates public courtyard space. Our belief is that the creation of these publci realm spaces is a great economic value builder that costs little...it is the perfect case of advanced block design building value.

Street frontage on primary street. Context is a transition zone of T-4 into there Village Square area (T5).

Small affordable rearyard unit looks and loves grand with its double porch fronting the public space. Its a tiny unit area wise.

Materials are local sources timber and brick masonry. Again we are a transition to the most urban part of the project and we wanted to begin the change in vocabulary from the more common T3 single family to the more Territorial Masonry Village Square.

This is a first glimpse at Carlton Landing's first flex buidling. This unit was designed as a great multi-use buidling in a house form for its T3 context. We are incorporated design tools that allow it to be a retail or serivce space, a single family unit, a mulit-family unit and a bed and breakfast. All with only minor interior changes. This is sustainable building at its core...there will never be a need to scrap off this building no matter what its best use becomes.


Great work by Grant Humpreys and the Carlton Landing Team.

Updating a Historic Building for a New Use

or why Historical Preservation and Adaptive Reuse is the most Sustainable things we can do.

Below is a photo of Beaufort, South Carolina's Carnegie Library. This building was built via the Carnegie Foundation as a gift to Beaufort with the Building opening in 1918. This is one of a handful of Carnegie Buildings built in South Carolina.

We have assisted the Great Beaufort Regional Chamber of Commerce in up fitting the building to allow them to occupy the building. The above interior photo shows a nice clean up of the formal Foyer space with historic trim and doorways remaining. We were unable to return the entire building to its full grand reading room configuration but are hopeful that funding can be secured in the near future.

Reusing this type of building is very sustainable for many reasons. First, it simply makes sense to not fill up a landfill with the building while having to build an entirely new building. That point makes some sense to most on the surface level, but fully consider that much of what a new building is going to be built with, is going to be very expensive in terms of energy. How much energy is a new foundation with all its steel going to cost? How about raw transportation costs? It really adds up quickly.

Second point is that historic buildings are in many ways just plain built better. This building is relatively new by 300 year old Beaufort Standards but, it has withstood many bad storms and a few minor seismic events as well. Most of the windows are original wood and the core building is a full masonry shell. With proper maintenance (which has to factored into any building) this building really can be maintained for almost ever. How many buildings built in Beaufort in the last few years can be expected to last even 30 years?

Lastly, as a civic building, this Library has become a landmark of Beaufort. It contributes to the Street scape of the Old Commons area and forms a great ensemble with the Arsenal and Firehouse Buildings. Not using and maintaining your landmarks and civic buildings & spaces is a path of decline for communities.

Carlton Landing

Building!

Great to see progress on some of our work out at Carlton Landing. We have five buildings going up there right now. Carlton Landing is a fantastic new community being built on Lake Eufaula in Oklahoma and is another great DPZ plan. www.carltonlanding.com




This is part of what is underway. We are very pleased that we were able to not only provide great buildings but also help with the urban design. This is part of the sequence we call block or micro design. We were able to get an extra unit in and also weave / layer the public realm deep into the block with added connectivity also.

These are two rowhouses and a stand alone single house also with a seperate cottage unit located in the rear on the alley frontage. (Its behind the forklift).

Very excited with the progess so far and the Carlton Landing Team is a pleasure to work with.

Results

This is why we all work so hard to get all the little things right about architecture and urbanism.   When you get it right, people’s lives are enriched which is the reward that we should all be striving for. 

Habersham Farms Project - The Buildings

 

Habersham Farms Project - The Buildings

Brown Design Studio, along with Moser Design Group is hosting a group of students from Andrews University for their Spring 2010 Semester. They will be writing periodically about their farm project for Family Farms Foundation’s Habersham Farms in Beaufort, SC. They will be designing a series of buildings for the farm, building one of them, and completing pricing sets for others, so that they’re ready for farmer Pat Gallagher to build

March 12, 2010
The project for Habersham Farms has been developing quite nicely. Our group of interns has been working on a redevelopment of the master/site plan as well as designing some prototypes for the main farm buildings. There will be four main buildings, which are as follows:

1.Kitchen/Pavilion: the footprint for this building will be around 3,500 sq. ft.. The function of this facility will be to teach cooking classes and serve as a community meeting point for various activities.

2.Education/Gallery building: this building will be approx. 2,500 sq. ft. on two floors. It will contain a large space that will be used for educational and mass media gatherings as well as office space, a kitchenette, and additional storage space. The main idea for this building is that groups can come here to learn about the functions and history of Habersham Farms while also learning about farming methods for the South Carolina Lowcountry.

3.Bunkhouse/Gateway: this building is about 4,000 sq. ft.. It will be two stories and will contain a bunkroom with kitchenette upstairs with locker rooms and a main storage area on the ground floor. The hope is that the bunkhouse could house anyone, students or workers, who may be working at Habersham Farms for a semester or indefinitely. It also derives its gateway name because the building will consist of two sections on either side with an open middle porte-cochere on the ground floor. This will provide a visual axis and connection from the main farm area to the barn.

4.Barn: there will be a typical barn that will draw its character from many SC Lowcountry barns. It will house livestock as well as be a storage space for various crops. There will also be an area where machinery and equipment can be repaired.
There will be various other structures and small outbuildings which really make the farm function as it should. These include greenhouses, a windmill, and shading/storage structures. In addition, our group is designing a prototype vegetable stand that will be located on Cherokee Farms Road. From this stand Farmer Pat will be able to sell daily to those customers who desire fresh, ripe, locally grown fruit and produce.
This past Wednesday we had a review of this project with farmer Pat Gallagher, Patrick Kelly from T&D Landholding’s and local Habersham architects, Eric Brown and Eric Moser. We had a good discussion regarding the implementation of these designs. As this project moves forward during the next few months you can follow its progress on this blog.

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CNU17 Presentation - Private Frontage Secrets

Eric presented on the T5 Public Realm at the last CNU in Denver. Specifically, this presentation shows images and drawings of different ways buildings interact with the public realm.