Blueprints For A Better City 

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A thriving urban core is necessary for a sustainable community, so we'll begin downtown, where three projects illustrate excellent design and planning: Bank of America's Gateway Village office development, surrounded by apartments constructed by various private developers; in First Ward, both First Ward Place (the replacement for Earle Village) and the new Garden District; and Ratcliffe on the Green, part of First Union's (now Wachovia's) improved stewardship of its South Tryon territory.

Getting it right, in the urban core

* Gateway Village offices, by architects Duda Paine from Raleigh (Turan Duda was Cesar Pelli's project architect for the Bank of America tower before starting his own firm) is an excellent example of a new type of urban office building, lower in scale, and more responsive to city street life. Skyscrapers were already losing favor before September 11, and that tragedy has increased the significance of this more community-friendly urban workplace.

Retail spaces and a YMCA line the streets, and the buildings incorporate fine new public spaces, with a park designed by local landscape architects Cole Jenest and Stone. However, every time I take my students there, our presence alarms the security guards, who circle us like hawks, not sure whether sketching is an approved activity. There are still some bugs in the system.

Part of the credit for the public faces of the buildings goes to the urban design firm RTKL, from Washington, DC, who provided the bank with an excellent set of urban design guidelines for the West Trade Street corridor.

The architecture of the offices is crisp and contemporary, free from Charlotte's highly infectious disease -- a craving to slather on fake historical detail in an attempt to look "olde-worlde." (Morrocroft is a typical example.) Gateway Village offices provide an excellent counterpoint to this tacky tendency.

Some of the surrounding housing is very good; David Furman's "soft lofts" (loft look-alikes with all mod-cons) that hide the giant parking deck from West Trade St. are very fine. The incorporation of public art -- especially "Wind Vale" by Ned Kahn -- commissioned by Bank of America to screen this same parking deck from the view across the elevated train tracks is also praiseworthy.

Currently, the complex is somewhat divorced from the rest of the city, but when the new Amtrak and commuter rail station is built at Graham and Trade, with its associated commercial development, together with new housing between Fifth and Sixth Streets, this "urban village" (certainly a trend of the future) will be connected to Tryon Street and Fourth Ward much more effectively. If an arena ever gets built between Trade Street and the Panthers' stadium, that facility, together with its associated public park, would link to the train station and Gateway Village in an urban ensemble that would be a model of integrated development for American cities to follow from coast to coast. Instead of the City Council and Chamber of Commerce flying to other cities in a desperate search for silver bullets to solve our problems, civic delegations would swoop in from all across the country to see how we achieved this urban marvel.

* Similar fine urban qualities -- good buildings around good public space -- are also found at the new development approaching completion on South Tryon Street, Ratcliffe on the Green. This project takes its name from the much-loved old Ratcliffe Flowers building that journeyed across Tryon Street and back to find its relocated niche in the new development.

The dominant element of the project is the 10-story building facing a new one-acre park, with eight floors of condominiums sitting atop one level of offices and a shopping arcade linking Tryon and College Streets at ground level. This new urban green space, which will include innovative public art, is being laid out to the detailed design of Cole Jenest and Stone, and forms the roof of an 850-space multi-story underground parking garage (like Boston's Post Office Square). It's framed on the south by the existing St. Peter's Catholic Church and its new Annex, a pleasing building by architect David Wagner, whose firm, Wagner Murray, is the coordinating architect of record for the overall project.

The design of the residential building, by FMK Architects, is a model for high-rise housing. The facade, rising eight stories above its commercial base, is well proportioned, with areas of recessed glazing that counterpoint projecting vertical brick masses. Elegant, thin roof slabs accent the sophisticated composition that houses 57 condos ranging from 900 to 4,600(!) square feet; the only wrong note is in the choice of dark, solar reflective glazing for the recessed planes, which creates an unfortunate corporate feel instead of a vibrant residential presence. A system of external louvers to shade the glass and provide a layer of shimmering shadows would have been better.