#city collaborative

ReSurfaced is back in June with a greener, more intimate pop-up vibe

ReSurfaced is coming back to Liberty and Shelby streets for another round of pop-up events and experiences this summer. The experiment in creating place from thin air has adjusted course after last year’s iteration and is ready for a new season with an updated look.

“One of the things we learned is the space is two times as big as the first one [on Main Street],” explained Patrick Piuma, director…

But this summer, City Collaborative is bringing ingenuity, shipping containers, and a healthy dose of tactical urbanism to the area with hopes of implanting a civic heart in the center of this otherwise challenging urban landscape. Meet ReSurfaced: The Liberty Build.

Scheduled to last 18 months or more—the most ambitious ReSurfaced yet—the Liberty Build will be located on a three-quarter-acre lot on the northwest corner of Liberty Street and Shelby Street that has been vacant since 2003. The project is, above all, a public commons that aims to knit together the three neighborhoods and bring life—for at least three days a week—to a forgotten patch of grass.

“ReSurfaced has always been about exploring creative ways to activate underutilized space,” Patrick Piuma, director of City Collaborative and planner at the Louisville Downtown Partnership, told Broken Sidewalk. “As in past projects, the beer garden and music/art programming will be a part of the upcoming project. However, we wanted to build off of past experiences and look at new components that could not only provide amenities for the local neighborhoods, but also test ideas for other sites around the community.”

The Liberty Street site was chosen specifically for its design challenges as an opportunity to push the achievements of the ReSurfaced program further in terms of creating “a community activation space that fosters civic engagement and entrepreneurialism.” As a public commons, the site hopes to knit together various aspects of food and drink Louisville has come to love from past events with entrepreneurship and new ways of public engagement. That means everything from co-working spaces to makerspaces are on the table.

The Liberty Build will be realized in two phases, the first a two-week session this summer running Thursdays through Saturdays from June 2 through June 11th focused on kickstarting a full rollout this September, also running Thursdays through Saturdays.

“Having the site for 18 months or more gives us the flexibility to create a framework or platform for civic-minded people to plug-in and explore with us,” Piuma said, “how we creatively utilize these dead spaces in our community.”

Because of the complicated site limitations, designing and programming the Liberty Build is crucial. Previous iterations of ReSurfaced featured space-defining elements such as brick walls or sweeping vistas along the Ohio River, but the Liberty Build had to get down to the nitty-gritty of place making on a blank slate. To accomplish this, an armature of shipping containers, some stacked, will form an active perimeter that defines a plaza space.

“We have a master conceptual plan for the space that Jeff Rawlins of Architectural Artisans, Louis Johnson and Jared Kaelin of Gresham, Smith & Partners helped develop with us along with input from Jeremy Semones of Core Design and several others,” Piuma said of the Liberty Street site. “The design takes in many variables associated with the local context, the temporary nature of the project, and builds off of our experiences from how a space can become a place by utilizing containers to help define an amorphous lot as we did with ReSurfaced: Three Days at 10th Street event last fall.”

The first phase will create a porous armature of shipping containers around site defining a central commons filled with picnic tables. These containers will provide new models of retail space that allow entrepreneurs to experiment with their goods and products, focused primarily on a beer garden concept with food.

The second phase expands the site with a basketball-court-sized soccer pitch—called a Five-A-Side pitch—paved with artificial turf and framed by additional shipping containers (more on that soon). During this phase, an expanded program of co-working and studio space, retail, and a community workshop will also be explored.

City Collaborative hopes to build off international connections it made last year with England’s De Montfort University to also include a studio space where students and staff from that school will focus on Education and Health & Wellness in Louisville.

ReSurfaced: The Liberty Build will constantly be changing. Expect to see sustainability, new ideas about retail space, plentiful events, and lots of opportunities for art (Metro Louisville’s Committee on Public Art is a partner) abounding at ReSurfaced: The Liberty Build. Already planned are live-painting events, art installations, and kinetic art displays. Makerspaces LVL1 and FirstBuild will also tinker with how we use public space, helping ReSurfaced to evolve over its 18 month run.

“This project is very much a work in progress,” Piuma stressed, “but the intention is that we create an interesting space that serves as a test bed for our community to explore how we address underutilized space, both in the public and private realm. A place where people can come together with ideas and dialog to address problems and opportunities throughout Louisville.”

(References for the above gallery: Flickr; Flickr; Flickr; Flickr; Flickr; Envelope A+D.)

The scale and ambition of ReSurfaced: The Liberty Build deservedly put the initiative in the same realm of some of the top shipping-container focused pop-up urbanism projects including the former Dekalb Market in Brooklyn, Brixton Pop in England, and Proxy in San Francisco.

And while today the site surrounding ReSurfaced: The Liberty Build looks like it’s been cleared for urban renewal, the site will some day, years from now, be a vital stretch connecting south from Nulu, which is trying its hardest to break free from its linear commercial corridor past. The Rabbit Hole Distillery will help break that mold, as will Bill Weyland’s renovation of the Louisville Chemical Building and planned hotel over on Hancock Street.

The original master plan for Liberty Green called for a dense arrangement of mixed-use residential structures along Shelby Street. (Courtesy AU Associates)

But most significantly, the eastward, privately-developed expansion of Liberty Green will will the north-south Shelby corridor with large-scale apartment buildings, hopefully carefully designed with appropriate retail space and good urbanism that will help bring vitality back to the area.

In the meantime, the area is getting a temporary heart and we can’t wait to see how an infusion of activity here will help the entire area come back to life. See you at the Liberty Build!

But these pop-up events by the nonprofit City Collaborative, Metro Louisville, and the Louisville Downtown Partnership are way more than social outings. They’re a new way of looking at the city. The first two iterations of Resurfaced took place in a parking lot void behind a set of four facades demolished for a failed development project. Organizers often refer to the idea as “pre-vitalization,” or showing the potential of a place to be something else.

Locations of five art installations for the Connect/Disconnect exhibition. (Courtesy Metro Louisville)

This fall’s three-day pop-up event will be held in a parking lot owned by Hillerich & Bradsby near Tenth Street and Rowan Street underneath Interstate 64 and its enormous Ninth Street Interchange ramps. And right alongside the Ohio River. Mayor Greg Fischer said in a statement that the new venue “brings a completely different feel and vibe.”

Resurfaced site. (Courtesy City Collaborative)

“When people see what the City Collaborative team does with the space, they will be impressed that a parking lot can become such an innovative, unique space that features beer, art, music and community,” the mayor continued.

A program of events includes an Arts Happy Hour on Thursday, October 15; a Fashion Show on Friday, October 16; and the SlowFood Fried Chicken Throwdown on Saturday, October 17. (This is the second year Resurfaced has hosted the Throwdown.) Live music, art, and DJs will also be part of the line-up.

ReSurfaced is a joint effort by City Collaborative, Louisville Metro Government, Louisville Downtown Partnership, and the Urban Design Studio. Other sponsors include Forest Giant, Magnolia Photo Booth, Core Design, Slow Food Bluegrass, and Hillerich & Bradsby. For updates, follow Resurfaced on its website or on Facebook.

While you’re at Resurfaced this Fall, we’ve got some homework for you. Besides admiring reflections on the river, browsing world-class art, and taking in the strange, looming architecture of the elevated highway, look a little beyond into Shippingport / East Portland and imaging how this site could one day help break through the Ninth Street Divide. It’s the beginning of the zipper along which the invisible barrier could fall.

Tenth Street leading to the Resurfaced site. (Courtesy Google)

To the west, there’s a vast windswept plain that used to be a busy rail yard. That barren wasteland will one day bloom into an expansion of Waterfront Park, whose master plan by MKSK Landscape Architecture won a Merit Award from the Kentucky chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects earlier this year. If you take the route to Resurfaced along Tenth Street, past the city’s newest distillery and through a sturdy flood gate, you’ll also pass by the site of a former rail yard building that was carelessly demolished in 2010.

Overhead view of the Waterfront Park Phase 4 Master Plan by MKSK. The Resurfaced site is at the lower right corner. (Courtesy MKSK)

The Tenth Street version of Resurfaced isn’t necessarily pre-vitalizing the parking lot—we’ve got a pretty good idea of what’s imagined for the area. But it does help reveal a westward connection that’s otherwise out of view to the average Downtown visitor.

An early sketch for extending River Road. (Courtesy Vision Louisville)

One day, River Road will continue west from its current Seventh Street terminus, likely aligning with Rowan Street at the future park site. There have been a number of sketches of what this extension might look like. A very rough version sketched out during the Vision Louisville process shows a River Road with a western interchange with Interstate 64 and the Ninth Street ramps removed. That idea helped to get things moving, but likely won’t be the final plan.

A proposed extension of River Road indicated in green.

Another version presented this past January by Insider Louisville (above in green) shows River Road extending through a forest of concrete support columns, aligning with Rowan Street and eventually connecting with Northwestern Parkway. Back then, Patti Clare, deputy director of advanced planning for Louisville Forward, told Insider than the River Road extension was “back on the table in a serious way.”

MKSK’s master plan for Waterfront Park Phase 4 (below) also shows the expanded River Road slightly differently.

Details for the new street are still being worked out, but until a plan is unveiled, take a look around and familiarize yourself with the site. Getting this right will be a key component of reclaiming Louisville’s waterfront and connecting Portland and Russell with Downtown.

[Top image of the Resurfaced site courtesy City Collaborative.]

Louisville’s first Pecha Kucha Night of 2015 tackles all things food on April 14

Next Tuesday, April 14, whet your appetite for all things food at Pecha Kucha Night (PKN) Louisville, the first of the year. The rapid-fire presentation format puts the limelight on leading local authorities and concerned citizens alike who have six minutes and 20 slides to tell a story. According to the organizers:

The theme of the event is Food for Thought and we have a great lineup of speakers…

Kentucky’s landscape architects name these 11 urban and rural projects the state’s best for 2015

The Kentucky chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects(ASLA) has released its list of top landscape architecture projects of the year, and there are some stunning examples of how the profession is shaping our experience of both urban and rural environments. Awards covered merit awards for built and unbuilt work, planning, student work, an overall honor award and a special award of…