• How ‘creative placemaking’ enhances a sense of place

    Art focused on people in a community can provide a bridge between them and the built environment, activating public space.
    “Creative placemaking” requires rethinking the artist's role and relationship to art, according to Dayton Castleman, an artist based in Northwest Arkansas. Many artists have what Castleman calls a “white cube” mindset, a reference to a room in a gallery or studio with white walls, where the...Read more

  • Reuse of buildings celebrates architecture and public space

    Adaptive reuse of building ensemble in Providence, Rhode Island, restores significant mixed-use structures, improves public space, and provides contextual architecture in a historic downtown.
    Providence, Rhode Island, has a history typical of a US East Coast city. “Providence’s pre-war building stock was of a particularly fine quality, built on a fine-grained network of streets and blocks,” notes Union Studio, an architecture firm based there. After World War II, the downtown was hit by...Read more

  • The infrastructure of community

    Porches and sidewalks are often ignored or dismissed, but they have important roles in building community.
    There was a time when The New Urbanism was belittled as “The New Porchism” for its propensity toward old-fashioned porches in developments like Seaside, Kentlands, and Celebration. Although new urbanists went to great lengths designing (usable) porches and explaining how this architectural feature—...Read more

  • Protect the porch

    The porch is more than just another single-family architectural feature, it's an important part of the culture of Black neighborhoods.
    As a young black man growing up dually in the urban oasis of Memphis and the countryside of Bells, Tennessee, I repeatedly encountered an architectural element in both places: the porch. My maternal grandmother was a front porch person; she enjoyed the street-watching (she didn't know who Jane...Read more