Canal Basin Charrette - Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative

Canal Basin Charrette

Exploring the Process of Place-Making
CUDC Quarterly, 1:4 (Summer, 2001)

How does an industrial riverfront become a great urban park? This was the question posed to four teams of designers who came to Cleveland the last weekend in March to develop concepts for the site of the Canal Basin, the former northern terminus of the Ohio & Erie Canal and the projected terminus of CanalWay Ohio, the heritage corridor that is being developed to link historical, recreational and natural resources along the path of the canal that stimulated Ohio’s development in the first half of the 1800s.

Spanning the Columbus Road peninsula just downhill from Downtown Cleveland, the Canal Basin site is an especially rich one, as was evidenced by the range and depth of the comments provided by over 100 interested Clevelanders at a Pre-Charrette meeting held in wintry conditions on Sunday, March 25. Environmentalists, history buffs, artists, hikers, bikers, rowers and even dog walkers all had thoughts on how a park at the Canal Basin site could become a regional destination and an important neighborhood amenity.

All of this information and more was presented to the charrette participants (see box left) upon their arrival on Friday the 30th. After a day of briefings and a party hosted by Ohio Canal Corridor, the designers took over the CUDC for a little over 24 hours of intensive work. In the best charrette tradition, this furious activity lasted up until the last minute on Sunday, a deadline that loomed especially large because Daylight Savings Time cut a precious hour out of the morning. Somewhat against their will, they were torn from their drawing tables and computers at lunchtime on Sunday, packed into a behemoth SUV rented for the occasion and carted off to the Metroparks Canal Reservation for a public presentation of their ideas.

As on the previous Sunday, this meeting was packed to capacity with community members eager to hear from the designers and a distinguished respondent panel: Jon Debo of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Cleveland artist Don Harvey, Lillian Kuri of Cleveland Public Art and Mark Robbins from the National Endowment for the Arts.

The products of the charette proved both surprising and provocative, again in the best charrette tradition. Only one of the charrette teams, Ignacio Bunster-Ossa and Sylvia Palms, produced a really detailed design proposal for the site. The others, while presenting many ideas that were clearly applicable to the Canal Basin site, left their work more open ended, presenting ideas about how a planning process might occur and tactics that might be used in implementing future planning decisions.

The apparently "unfinished" nature of these proposals was only partly a product of necessity (the shortness of time, the complexity of the site). For the most part, it was a product of choice and of design philosophy. Rather than presenting a single finished project as "the" solution to the site, the designers (particularly Mathur and Allen) sought to expand and deepen discussion about the kind of thinking that goes into a park on a site that all the designers found extraordinarily rich and inspiring.

The chart to the immediate right is reproduced from Stan Allen’s presentation. It gives an idea of what it might mean to focus on designing the process rather than designing the project. Compare it with the graphics on Pages 8-10, and you’ll start to see the sort of design sensibility that emerges from this kind of thinking.

While Allen concentrated on identifying the framework for preparing the Cuyahoga Valley for new uses, Mathur worked with an evocative set of metaphors (glaciation and recession) to develop a flexible framework for gradually turning the Canal Basin site to new uses. Something similar was present in aspects of Peter Latz’

Phasing Strategies
Stan Allen (Field Operations)

At Project inception (0 – 5 years):
movement of people and goods
provision of service networks
Assemble and remediate vacant
and under-utilized land
green the river –bio-remediation creates low maintenance greenspace
Invest in pioneer uses
arts + new technologies
promote mixtures:
patchwork of old and new uses

Development phases (5 – 15 years):
Upgrade the infrastructure routes branch and multiply
Envision alternative development scenarios
emergence of new technologies and typolgies

Maturity (15 – 30 years):
Anticipate change:
continually learn, evaluate and innovate

design, which proposed a gradual greening of the site combined with the construction of flexible, solar-powered structures that could accomodate a variety of recreational and cultural uses. Ignacio Bunster’s design, though presented more conventionally, included many similar ideas for flexible use and gradual environmental remediation of the site.

These innovative design ideas–very different from the high-style, "signature" approach that has dominated so much of the design world in recent years–showed the extraordinary vitality and sophistication of contemporary landscape architecture and its particular relevance to the future of urban design.

Beyond this basic lesson of design philosophy, the charrette also produced a number of lessons that will figure in the process as the push for a great park on the Canal Basin site continues

The bridges and industrial artifacts that criss-cross the Cuyahoga Valley can be made into positive features, not hindrances. Several of the proposals showed park structures that were worked into or under the bridges, and all of the designers agreed that they were the biggest factor in making the site historically evocative and beautiful.
Parks are for a lot more than recreation. The designs suggest a wide variety of entertainment and educational uses that might appeal to people who don’t read historical markers or go on interpretive hikes. In a site with as many layers of meaning as the Canal Basin, the very meaning of "park" could well be up for grabs (see above).
You don’t have to clean a park site before you can use it. Soil and water remediation can be made part of the park’s program and exhibits, and they can go on right where people can learn about them, even as they enjoy whatever the park has to offer at a particular moment in the parkmaking process.

Click on these links for portfolios of the work produced in the charrette:

Click here for further development of the
concepts by Allen and Busnter-Ossa

The Canal Basin Charrette was a complex undertaking, and the UDC staff gratefully acknowledge the help of project partners: Ohio Canal Corridor, City of Cleveland, Ohio & Erie Canal Association, Cleveland Waterfront Coalition, Flats Oxbow Association and National Park Service/Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

The charrette was supported by generous grants from:
National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
The George Gund Foundation
Ohio & Erie Canal Association
Ohio Canal Corridor

Pre-Charette Meeting: Interested members of the public trudge the site in near white-out conditions.

At work in the CUDC: Anuradha Mathur doing photomontage the old-fashioned way with scissors and paste,

while Peter Latz and Michelle Hollins ponder an image on the computer screen.

The public presentation of the Charrette projects at the Metroparks Canal Reservation. Respondents (from left) Mark Robbins, Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts; John Debo, Superintendt, Cuyahoga Valley National Park; Don Harvey, Atist; Lillian Kuri, Director, Cleveland Public Art

Stan Allen is an architect, theorist and founding partner, with landscape architect James Corner, of the New York and Philadelphia based firm of Field Operations. Current projects include a redevelopment study for ten miles of the once thriving industrial waterfront of the Delaware River in Philadelphia. For the charrette, he was assisted by Julie Parrett.

Ignacio Bunster-Ossa is an architect, landscape architect, urban designer and principal of the national firm of Wallace Roberts & Todd. Recent projects include preservation and improvements to the palisades and beach in Santa Monica, CA and restoration of the Haxall and Kanawha canals in Richmond, VA. He was assisted by Sylvia Palms.

Peter Latz is a landscape architect from Kranzberg, Germany, who has achieved world-wide acclaim for his innovative work on the reclamation and reinterpretation of obsolete industrial complexes and contaminated brownfield sites. Among his winning competition entries are mixed-use development of a former military base in Potsdam, Germany, design of a public park in a steelworks at Völklingen, and conversion of a blast furnace into an arts park in Duisburg-Nord. He was assisted by Michelle Hollins

Anuradha Mathur is an architect, landscape architect and professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania. Current projects include a "revelatory landscapes" installation at an Aquatic Park in Berkeley, CA, a botanical garden in Madhurai, India and a landscape strategy for the City of Bangalore. She was assisted by Dilip Dacunha.