Windcrest Village project:
Duany brings New Urbanism to Old Sprawl
January 30, 2008The New Urbanism arose in the 1980s as a reaction against just about everything that was happening in America's suburban growth rings in the 1960s and '70s. The New urbanism was the anti-sprawl.
But now, increasingly, sprawl and anti-sprawl are meeting, or maybe colliding. A case in point is Windcrest Village, a proposed 300-acre New Urbanist project in and near the suburban city of Windcrest, about nine mikes northeast of downtown San Antonio.
The project reflects a convergence of interests that is more or less inevitable at this historical moment, not only in this particular location but in similarly situated suburbs around the country.
When Windcrest was incorporated as a city in 1959, it was in a largely rural area at the edge of San Antonio. The freeway system put Windcrest in the path of growth: Interstate 35 formed its western boundary, and the interchange between I-35 and the future Loop 410 was planned at the northwest corner.
Most of Windcrest developed as tracts of mid-priced single-family houses on a grid of gently curving streets, typical of the period, with an elementary school and a 9-hole golf course in the middle. Part of the idea of Windcrest was that taxes on commercial property at its edges -- along the I-35 frontage road on the west and Walzem Road on the south -- would help sustain a high level of public services and amenities while holding down taxes for homeowners.
It worked nicely for a while. Windsor Park Mall, built at the Walzem-I-35 intersection, spurred a profusion of strip malls and franchise restaurants in the area.
But things began to go sour in the 1990s. Though Windcrest residential tracts held their value, the Camelot subdivision of cheap "starter homes" south of Walzem Road deteriorated, as did its infrastructure. Windsor Park Mall gained a reputation as a gang hangout, lost customers and eventually closed. The rest of Walzem Road looked increasingly frayed.
A problem turned into an opportunity. Rackspace Managed Hosting, a rapidly growing technology company, needed more space. The vacant mall property beckoned. A private-sector partnership, the Windcrest Economic Development Company, formed to purchase the mall and lease it to Rackspace.
WEDC also bought mostly undeveloped property forming an L-shaped tract south of the mall along I-35 and Eisenhauer Road, which runs parallel to Walzem south of Camelot, and another large undeveloped tract stretching from Walzem to Eisenhauer immediately east of Camelot.
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Site map of proposed Windcrest Village. West tract would link with future Rackspace campus, at upper left. East tract includes mixed-use town center south of Walzem Road. |
The development company's idea was to create two hip, lively, urban, mixed-use neighborhoods to appeal to Rackspace employees, among other emerging markets on San Antonio's Northeast Side. In stark contrast with everything around them, these neighborhoods would follow the New Urbanist model. The prominent Miami firm Duany Plater-Zyberk was recruited as the master planner, and in December 2007 Andres Duany led a weeklong design charrette involving area residents, businesses and public officials from the cities of Windcrest and San Antonio.(The western tract and the future Rackspace campus have been annexed by the city of Windcrest; the eastern tract, designed to be more residential in orientation but with a mixed-use town center near Walzem Road, is in the city of San Antonio.)
A detailed plan is not yet available, but some strong ideas emerged from the charrette. (The images reproduced here are taken from the online charrette journal.)
The most intriguing was Duany's response to the reality of commercial development along the I-35 frontage road in the western tract. Bowing to the inevitable, he accepts that this strip will be developed in the standard way, with the prototype buildings of franchise restaurants set far back from the road behind parking lots.
But behind that line of standard stuff, Duany proposes a traditional two-way "Main Street" connecting Eisenhauer Road and the Rackspace campus. A rendering of the concept shows narrow two-story blockfront commercial buildings abutting the Main Street sidewalk and wrapping partly around the restaurant prototypes. Duany suggests that the wraparound buildings could include pedestrian-oriented entrances to the franchise restaurants. Across Main Street are shown larger mixed-use buildings, also abutting the sidewalk, with parking lots behind them.
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Standalone
restaurants would address frontage road conventionally, but narrow
wraparound buildings behind them would help define a traditional "main
street." |
In its schematics, this hybrid concept has obvious practical advantages over the standard Texas model of development along freeways, in which the only connecting spine is the one-way frontage road. (Texas, perversely, is the only state that builds continuous frontage roads along freeways.) Main Street would give Rackspace workers the option of walking easily to lunch or shopping, or driving without having to make a full circuit of frontage roads. Proximity to the customers of the highway-oriented franchise restaurants might make the Main Street storefronts more attractive locations for one-off restaurants, bars and small retailers.
One shouldn't make too much of renderings produced during a charrette, but the Main Street rendering does show some ways in which the concept could go wrong. It shows the sidewalk in front of the wraparound building shaded by a continuous and unvaried arcade, which would be a bore. With or without the arcade, the composition is too rigid, and can hardly be otherwise given the very narrow space allotted to the wraparound buildings, which are little more than false fronts for the franchise restaurants. A little more looseness, a little more variety of setback, would be more inviting and more compatible with the building culture of South Texas.
On the west side of Main Street, the rendering shows a continuous row of mixed-use two- and three-story buildings -- a development density that might be unrealistically high unless the project becomes a hip regional destination comparable to South Congress Avenue in Austin. That might be possible, but it'll take a while. The plan will need to address phasing to concentrate the action.
Looking beyond Main Street, the concept plan shows numerous small parks, about one acre on average. Those little swatches of green look nice on the plan, but they would be costly to maintain and they would scatter outdoor activity too diffusely across the neighborhood, limiting opportunities for social encounters. A smaller number of larger parks would be more useful, allowing amenities such as basketball half-courts or community gardens to coexist comfortably with passive open space, and also would be more sociable.
The concept of a "community-friendly gas station," with the retail storefront abutting the sidewalk and the gas pumps in the rear, is an altogether sensible way to provide for the automobile without violating the integrity of the sidewalk. The idea is not exactly new -- some cities have required that kind of site design for several years -- but it has not been seen in this region.
What will it all look like? San Antonio architect Michael Imber, a member of the charrette team and a frequent collaborator with Duany, has spoken of the difficulty of drawing an architectural vocabulary for Windcrest Village from its surroundings. The problem isn't just that so many of the existing buildings in the area are so cheap and dull, but that they're so horizontal. New Urbanist density and mixed use need a vocabulary with strong vertical elements.
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Architect Lew Oliver
borrowed from 19th-century Hill Country traditions for a rendering of
"village homes." |
To judge from the charrette renderings -- which, granted, do not necessarily represent how the project's architectural design standards will turn out -- the team settled for imagery from Texas towns in the late 19th century. According to my calendar, we are now in the 21st century. Culturally, architectural imagery from the infancy of the telephone seems unsuited to a neighborhood for young tech workers in the era of the Internet and the iPod. Granted, many hip, contemporary, tech-savvy people are attracted to the authentic historic architecture of the Hill Country, but the charms of a Bogus Boerne might prove to be short-lived.
Mike
Greenberg
