Last night at the City of Sacramento Design Commission the infill project at 24/T Streets in Midtown Sacramento took a significant step forward as the Commission forwarded advisory conditions and a recommendation for approval to the Planning Commission.  The project has been through an extensive public review process, resulting in a 5-unit apartment project in a craftsman style.  Mark Groen, Senior Architect with Vrilakas Architects is lead architect on the project.

Several neighbors who had been actively involved in the review process came to express support for the project and for the efforts of the applicant, neighbors and City staff in reaching an agreement that would allow the project to move forward.  The next step for the project is to gain approval by the Planning Commission on Thursday, July 28th.

During the hearing the applicant requested a number of modifications to the proposed conditions for the project, in order to limit potential problems on the alley and to have the option to use newly available window technology that is high-quality and energy efficient.  Commissioner Todd Rudd, who holds the contractor/builder position on the 7-member profession-based commission, was instrumental in helping to clarify the details of the applicant’s requests and allow the Commission to approve the two requested items.

Below are elevations for the project, pulled from the meeting Agenda.  The full agenda and recording of the meeting can be found here.

Launch 2011 is on this Saturday evening up at the Greens Hotel in North Sacramento!  Looking forward to a great evening of design across media, swimming through a crowd of stylish folks from Sacramento and beyond.  This is gonna be good folks…

Doors open at 5pm, tickets are available online, and shuttles are available from Hot Italian in Midtown.

In case you missed it, here’s a link to the Inhabitat article on the opening of section 2 of Highline Park.  This park is a stunningly effective adaptive re-use of formerly defunct infrastructure to create valuable public space, in this case an elevated rail line running for several miles through Manhattan.

A walk through the treetops

Last week I received the November newsletter from one of my favorite plant nurseries, Lotus Valley Natives. Tucked away along the South Fork American River in Coloma/Lotus Valley, this small but growing plant nursery focuses on making great native plants available for foothill and mountain landscapes.

If you’ve never been up there, it’s worth the drive just to pass through the area. Beautiful hillsides and forests, winding roads, and rustic fences give the area a bygone-era charm, and every once in a while you stumble onto a stunning panoramic view. Also in the area is Marshall Gold Discovery State Park, and of course a beautiful stretch of wild and scenic river.

The nursery is owned and operated by Mahala and Jinnah, two childhood friends who grew up in Lotus Valley and share a love of the outdoors. These two kind women are very knowledgeable about how natives can best be used, plant solutions for challenging soil types, and how to combine plants for wildlife/habitat value.

This month they also have a 25% sale on groundcovers going. Visit their website to learn more… http://www.lotusvalleynatives.com/

I came across a great article today from the folks at 99% about the value of downtime and the space in which to find it. Here’s a preview link, courtesy of tinyurl.com:
http://preview.tinyurl.com/235kz5x

The basics of the article, while written for a primary audience of creatives, is applicable to everyone in my view. In the dynamically interconnected, always-on setting we’ve surrounded ourselves in, space and moments to find the peace to think deep thoughts is precious and rare.

In my work I’ve found that identifying a ‘point of refuge’ is one of the most critical elements to any design project. This may take the form of a small patio in a backyard design, or may be as simple as a well-placed bench in a public park. While the needs of the intended user and the relative significance to the overall design differ from project to project, it remains an element that cannot be overlooked.

(hmm…) This may also explain the success of pocket parks in congested urban settings, and perhaps why they don’t tend to work as well in less congested settings- they fill a critical need for a pause and a deep breath that is rarely recognized or discussed in the hectic pace of urban living. In settings that are less overwhelmingly busy, the need is less pronounced and so other steps need to be taken to promote the magnetism of a particular space. More to come on this idea in a future post.

For now, find a place in or around your home or community that helps you find ‘center’, and take steps to help it be a point of refuge for you.

I’ve been thinking about a lunch conversation I had recently with Pamela Frickmann, one of the Sacramento Tree Foundation’s friendly neighborwoods foresters. We were discussing the apparent discontinuity between recognizing the benefits of tree shade for homes versus the desire to expand localized solar power when she brought up a very good point: “Why does local solar power have to be on individual houses? Wouldn’t it make more sense to install twenty homes worth of solar panels on top of, say, the new Target on 65th Street, and provide trees to shade the twenty homes instead?”

Good point. Let’s explore that idea:

The basic structure already exists. SMUD recently introduced a pilot program called Solar Shares where renters, condominium residents, and homeowners with roof shading can obtain the benefits of having installed solar by investing in a ‘virtual array’ – a segment of a local solar farm being built on behalf on SMUD in the nearby area.

Sacramento is home to millions of square feet of commercial office and retail space. Many of these buildings are far too large to receive any real benefit from adjacent trees, and instead rely on roofing materials with a high reflectivity index to reduce their cooling load as well as the urban heat island effect. Now imagine if instead we simply covered large proportions of these rooftops with solar arrays, using the Solar Shares program to offset the installation costs. The benefits would be threefold: SMUD would be able to much more quickly meet its requirements for solar power generation imposed by the State; commercial property owners would derive a potential micro-income stream from a building component that is usually a net drain _and_ the reduction of UV exposure would likely increase the lifespan of the roofing materials; and Solar Shares participants would have far more ‘virtual array’ credits available to them.

And of course, we would then be completely unfettered in our regional pursuit of shade for homes. Long live the urban canopy…