In January, the Moscow Urban Renewal Agency, or MURA, solicited ideas for the development of two parcels of land located at the intersection of Jackson and Sixth streets in Moscow. The site has been on MURA’s radar for a long time, probably since the agency’s inception in 1995. Over the years, the focus would mature into a plan, known as the Legacy Crossing, “designed to address economic underdevelopment and physical deterioration … including, but not limited to, streets, sidewalks, pedestrian paths, and water and sewer utilities.” In 2008, the city of Moscow adopted it.
So much hangs in the balance. Not only will the eventual project have to pencil out financially, but do so while also solving for a gamut of conflicting architectural forces. Walk one block to the east and you are in an architecturally coherent and vibrant downtown but then do the same in the other direction and the opposite is the case. Repeat the journey north-south and your mind might break, now having to adjust between a medical center on one end of town and a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop across the street.
But wait, there is more, namely a future path endearingly called “Hello Walk,” a beeline linking downtown to the University of Idaho. It bisects the site into two, which is interesting and easy enough had it not also been for the fact that it does so diagonally, potentially forcing future building or buildings to split at the corner, violating one of the first tenets of urban planning. Urban definition is premised on strong and well-defined corners. Break them and you risk reverting back to the suburbs, where buildings are islands unto themselves, with little or no continuity between edges.
Other challenges exist, including fitting parking in a block and a vision otherwise at pains trying to promote pedestrian culture. “Pedestrian connectivity is also a priority,” insists the call for proposals, “because of the unique location of the Legacy Crossing area lying between the University of Idaho Campus and Moscow’s Downtown and Central Business District.” This necessarily means a porous ground floor that allows for a seamless flow of people between street edge and the interior of the project on the other side, opening onto what could be a communal courtyard.
None of these challenges are insurmountable but they do require design skills and minds able to dissect the problem from various angles. How those will be retained is anyone guess, with little or no money offered to support their hire. “The MURA will not pay costs incurred in responding to this RFP,” the RFP emphatically says and adds that “MURA may cancel this process at any time prior to the execution of an Exclusive Right to Negotiate Agreement without liability.”
Those developers that will respond to the RFP will likely do so thoughtfully, but also tentatively, for the obvious reason that they can’t afford to spend the money necessary to fully unpack the issues bearing on the challenge. A better solution would be to offer a select number of developers, distilled from a larger pool of qualified ones, a stipend with which to cover at least the basic costs associated with designing a project of this sensitivity and magnitude. And who knows, perhaps by funding the proposals, MURA and the city may set into motion a healthy competition between those who apply, inspiring pride in putting forth a solution more creative than the next one.
This is not the place to fully describe the architectural response commensurate with the challenge, but suffice it to say it cannot be a mere extrusion of a plan multiplied several times up in the air. No, it has to recognize and reconcile the visual and functional forces converging on the site. This will necessarily mean height variations, to match in scale and character those of buildings next door and across the street, but others as well that address changes in privacy, views and the like. Be it through window and balcony sizes, push and pull façade techniques or material change, or likely all of the above, the final building may, like a chameleon, need to sway with the punches, so to speak, slowly but surely changing as the conditions of the site change.
MURA and the city are right to call for urgency. But no quality ideas will likely come forth, much less an exciting building, unless both are willing to enter into a more generous communication with potential developers, legally, financially and otherwise.
Rahmani is a professor of architecture at Washington State University where he teaches courses in design and theory.
