From the April 2006 issue of New Urban News

New charrette system may bring more production builders into TNDs

Philip Langdon

 Drawing Courtesy of Geoffrey Mouen
Three central Florida architects have devised a new charrette process that they believe will appeal to large production homebuilders and expand the number of Traditional Neighborhood Developments (TNDs) in North America.
Former Celebration town architect Geoffrey Mouen, Kenneth Hitchens, a resident of the Baldwin Park new urban development in Orlando, and W.A. “Bud” Lawrence of Orlando-based Morales-Keesee Design Associates say they’ve found a way to help production builders design a broad mix of housing and get it approved with unusual speed. The three are collaborating on a concept called Architectural Charrette Team (ACT), which they say can create large numbers of residential designs and shepherd them through the permitting stage in a matter of months. The savings in time, plus the broad variety of house designs, should overcome complexities that have made production builders reluctant to get involved in TNDs, Mouen says.
Mouen, who lives and works in Celebration, says ACT has used its charrette process with a nationally known production builder to create designs and construction documents for a 712-acre TND called Randal Park, in southeast Orlando, where construction is expected to begin this fall. Randal Park is to have 1,870 highly varied housing types along with up to 350,000 square feet of retail, about 100,000 square feet of offices, a seven-screen movie theater, grocery store, and parks.
Mouen and his partners declined to identify the builder they’ve worked with, but New Urban News determined that it is Dallas-based Centex Homes, which operates in 25 states and delivered 33,000 housing units in the fiscal year ending in March 2005. Centex will be both the developer and the chief builder for Randal Park, which Orlando city officials are touting as a Smart Growth-New Urbanism development that will apply principles embodied in the 1,100-acre Baldwin Park project (see July 2004 New Urban News) and the Disney-developed Celebration.
Charrettes have been used extensively by new urban firms to do the planning for TNDs. The New Urban Guild has also used them to produce schematic designs for dwellings and other buildings. What makes ACT’s charrette system different, Mouen says, is that it doesn’t stop with planning or schematic design. It goes all the way to producing construction documents — for Randal Park, complete construction documents for 90 building plans, including townhouses, convertible live-work buildings, carriage houses, medium-size detached houses, and “mansions” of 3,000 to 5,000 square feet.
The ACT procedure calls for a series of charrette-style workshops that bring together local stakeholders, the production builder, city officials, and architects and urban planners. For Randal Park, ACT conducted a five-day schematic design charrette last September, a five-day design development charrette for about 15 houses in December, a mansion charrette in January, and a two-week charrette in March that completed the construction documents for 90 buildings or variations on them. Without such a process, production builders “would never do a new urban project because it’s just too complex for them,” Mouen says. Production builders “typically build single-use neighborhoods with pretty much one price point,” observes Hitchens. The charrette system reportedly not only saves time — it is estimated to have shaved six months off what would have been the builder’s design timeline for Randal Park — but also gives the builder many more sizes and types of dwellings than in a conventional subdivision, thus allowing the builder to reach more segments of the market.

APRIL CHARRETTE

In early April, ACT expects to organize a charrette to begin designing all but the custom-home portion of residential work in Wesmont Station, a brownfield project in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey, where New York-based designer Marianne Cusato is “town architect,” Somerset Development is developer, and Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company is the urban designer (see page 18 for update). ACT works with Cusato as well as Christine Franck, both based in New York City. Mouen and his partners describe ACT as a “virtual corporation,” allowing each project to draw on a different group of participants. Some participants may be members of the New Urban Guild. Mouen says this method of working has become possible partly because the pool of design talent has grown in recent years, thanks to New Urbanism, the Guild, and educational efforts involving the American Institute of Building Design and the Institute for Classical Architecture & Classical America.
“It’s another mechanism that will allow New Urbanism to scale up,” he says, and influence a bigger portion of housing development. Mouen says large builders want to construct more new urban projects because they see there’s a market for them.
At Randal Park, one of the more ingenious designs is a carriage house of 1,100 to 1,800 sq. ft. that sits on a 42-by-42-foot fee-simple lot on an alley, “in a true mews we created,” according to Mouen. Townhouses will be produced in widths of 16, 18, 20, 22, and 36 feet. The 36-foot version is essentially a townhouse with its long side parallel to the street, allowing more light to enter. For that design, the lot depth was reduced to 90 feet. The convertible live-work is a unit whose first floor can start as residential and later be converted to office or retail. With so many different designs, the developer can create variety throughout the project.
Centex initially resisted the charrette system, but the City of Orlando required a traditional development on the Randal Park site, and the builder realized that to get the project, it would have to try an unconventional method.
Mouen says this system makes a pattern book — another tool of new urbanists — unnecessary in these projects. “There is no design code and no pattern book,” he notes, and the need for architectural review is greatly reduced. Eave details, for example, will be mocked up on site, so contractors will know exactly what they’re expected to build. The result of this system will not be as individualized as custom houses, but it should be more diverse and skillful than what a production builder would otherwise create.

This article is available in the April/May 2006 issue of New Urban News, along with images and many more articles not available online. Subscribe or order the individual issue.