Artistic, functional junctions

Imagine that it's 2020 and you've never been to Winston-Salem.

How would you react to the city's downtown if you drove on Business 40? What would you think of other major roadways around town?

Randall Tuttle, chairman of the Creative Corridors Coalition, has a pretty clear idea.

"When you drive through here, we want you to think, 'Wow. This is not just your normal road. This is not just your normal city,' " he said.

The coalition, a nonprofit advocacy group with more than 1,000 members and many supporters, is run by a board of directors and contracts certain tasks. It is tapping the community for ways to influence the look of the work that the N.C. Department of Transportation and the City of Winston-Salem will do in the next several years on roadways in and around downtown.

And Design Workshop, a Denver company specializing in urban design, is translating that input into a master plan and design guidelines that the DOT and the city might follow.

The coalition's initial focus was the 11 bridges scheduled to be replaced on a downtown stretch of Business 40. In recent months, however, the group has started looking at other roadways as well as landscapes, lighting, streets, signage and public art. It is providing ideas for how the Third, Fourth and Fifth Street bridges spanning U.S. 52 might look in the future, even though the DOT has no plans to enhance them.

The Arts Council of Winston-Salem and Forsyth County secured a $200,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The grant is financing the work that the Design Workshop will complete by Aug. 31 to meet the grant's requirements.

The grant was awarded through an NEA program called the Mayors' Institute on City Design 25th Anniversary Initiative. This "supports creative placemaking projects that contribute toward the livability of communities and help transform sites into lively, beautiful, and sustainable places with the arts at their core," NEA media materials say.

"We think it's great," said Pat Ivey, a DOT division engineer. "This is really unique to North Carolina DOT." He added that the coalition is building on a recent change in DOT policy, which looks at ways of going beyond standard designs.

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The plan that Design Workshop is formulating answers some big-picture questions:

Which aspects of the city's culture and history should the corridors reflect or explore? Which parts of the corridors will be enhanced, to what degree and how?

If enhancements to roadways and bridges are to be "green," will lighting be powered with solar panels and windmills? Also, could stormwater be used for irrigation?

If public art is infused in bridges and/or the landscapes that surround them, which artists might be approached to create the pieces?

As for the guidelines that Design Workshop is formulating, these address nitty-gritty issues on the ground. They might, for example, provide for a pedestal to be placed on the pedestrian portion of a bridge so that a piece of public art could land there in the future. They might specify a width for pedestrian or bike ways. They also might spell out the types of materials to be used in the building of a bridge as well as how the sides of a bridge would look.

Although specifics of the plan and the guidelines are being hammered out, broad themes are emerging.

Glenn Walters, a principal of Design Workshop, is working with the coalition. He likened the work his firm is doing to making one coherent story out of a collection of bridges, walls, landscape areas, streets and lights. The story includes major periods, from the settlement of Moravians in the 18th century to the emergence of "Arts and Innovation" as an expression of Winston-Salem's aspirations after the decline of such industries as tobacco and textiles. It also includes chapters that play out in individual neighborhoods.

Walters said that he wants the plan and guidelines to enhance connections among neighborhoods that were divided or cut off from one another after major highways were built. This would mean, for example, making the bridges that span U.S. 52 more biker- and pedestrian-friendly.

Public art is being "integrated into all aspects" of the plan and guidelines. The type of art isn't clear yet.

"We're focusing more on artful design of bridges, but keeping places for great art to be incorporated," Tuttle said.

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So far, the work on bridges has resulted in recommendations for "different levels" of features to be incorporated into each of the U.S. 52 bridges as well as each of the 11 bridges scheduled to be replaced along a 1-mile stretch of Business 40 between Peters Creek Parkway and U.S. 52. The Business 40 project will begin with preliminary work in 2018 and prompt a closure of the highway in 2019, Ivey said.

There are four levels of what the coalition's literature calls "bridge treatments." The highest level is called "Marvel," followed by "Signature," "Focal" and "Enhanced."

"Marvel" would consist of a vertical, engineering wonder of an icon bridge. It would be visible from three miles and affirm the city's status as a place of "Arts and Innovation."

The relation of the "Marvel" bridge to other bridges along a corridor can be likened to the high point in a "crescendo" effect. This means, in essence, that the visual impact of bridges builds as you enter a city and approach its center. The impact lessens as you leave the city's center and continue driving out of town.

The coalition is also trying to influence the building of a new road called the Salem Creek Connector. The connector will begin at Martin Luther King Drive, cross U.S. 52 and continue to Stadium Drive. That construction is scheduled to begin next month. The building of the connector will begin in 2013, Ivey said.

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Ivey said the coalition's recommendations will not influence the work that DOT is doing on Martin Luther King Drive and U.S. 52. That work "is so far along that we would not have had time to work with them and make any design changes to accommodate some of the guidelines there without delaying the project," Ivey said.

But the recommendations would affect future city work on Martin Luther King Drive between U.S. 52 and Business 40, Ivey said, adding that they would enhance landscapes and lighting to make MLK more visually appealing.

As for what happens after Design Workshop's report is done, the coalition will work from September until the end of the year to ensure that the plan and the guidelines get the kind of community backing that will motivate DOT and the city to follow them.

"We, the community, have to receive the work of design consultants and decide to support it and tell DOT that this is what our community wants," Tuttle said. "Even though we're 1,000 members, we're only 1,000 out of a city of hundreds of thousands."

kkeuffel@wsjournal.com

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