Pattonsburg's Design Process
by Chris Kelsey
BNIM Architects
Kansas City, Missouri

In the spring of 1994, the director of the Missouri Department of Natural Resources Division of Energy -Cher Stuewe-Portnoff - alerted Mayor Warford to another village that had been destroyed in the Great Flood and was planning to relocate and rebuild. Valmeyer, Illinois, was working with a team of experts sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Illinois State Energy Office to design a new community that used advanced building practices, state-of-the-art technologies and a rebuilding strategy known as "sustainable development".

Mayor Warford attended a town meeting in Valmeyer, where the team of experts - including architects, renewable energy specialists, a wastewater engineer, a developer and a specialist in community economics-- presented the results of three months of planning with the community. Warford liked what he saw, and he asked DOE to sponsor a similar exercise at Pattonsburg.

DOE and the Federal Emergency Management Agency responded in the fall of 1994. They hired Kansas City architect Bob Berkebile, nationally known expert in sustainable design. Berkebile assembled some of the nation's best practicing experts in sustainable development. The two Federal agencies agreed to pay travel and expenses for team members. The Missouri Division of Energy provided staffing and logistics support.

The Design Process: What's a Charette?

To help the Village of Pattonsburg design a new town, design team leader Bob Berkebile employed a planning model that could be useful elsewhere. It made use of a format that has come to be called the "design charette".

Webster's defines a "charette" as a "group assembled to examine a problem or disrupt matters, aided by specialists." For some 25 years, the American Institute of Architects has operated the Rural/Urban Design Assistance Team Project that has used charettes to help communities solve design problems.

Berkebile adopted this model for Valmeyer and Pattonsburg, conducting what might be called "sustained charettes". In each of the communities, design assistance teams held a series of three or four three-day charettes, each building upon the progress of the last. The entire citizenry was invited to attend and participate in each meeting.

Here is a brief description of the charette process in Pattonsburg.

Scoping Visit

During the summer of 1994, Berkebile paid a "scoping visit" to Pattonsburg - a trip in which he gathered information to gauge the village's commitment to relocation and to sustainable development principles. How deep did these commitments go? Was relocation and sustainable redevelopment the vision of just one leader - Mayor Warford - or was he supported by other leading figures in the community?

How accepting would the community be of a team of outsiders?

Had a great deal of conventional planning already been done? If so, how willing was the community to throw it out and start over?

Surrounded by tools and motorcycle parts, Berkebile met with a group of village officials in Mayor Warford's motorcycle dealership. Among them were officials of the Green Hills Regional Planning Commission, which was coordinating the community's disaster relief grants and its planning efforts, along with members of the architectural and engineering firm hired by Green Hills to design major elements of the new town.

Berkebile found that a critical group of leaders favored relocation and were willing to listen to new ideas about sustainable redevelopment. Little planning had been done. Overall, Pattonsburg seemed like a good prospect for innovation, and Berkebile set about assembling a design team.

For openers, he asked Mayor Warford and other local leaders to assemble a mass of background information the team would need to do its work - topographical maps of the proposed new site, a history of the community, data about its energy sources and prices.

Work Begins

On September 16-17, 1994, the first wave of the design team visited the village to begin work. The purpose was to introduce community residents to some of the options they could choose for their new town, options, already being applied by other communities around the country.

On Friday evening the high school gym, Bill Becker of the U.S. Department of Energy started the weekend by showing a video about Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, a rural town that relocated from a floodplain between 1979 and 1983, and built the nation's first solar-heated commercial district. The video showed the villagers in Pattonsburg how shopkeepers and homeowners just like them, facing a nearly identical crisis, had successfully engaged in sustainable redevelopment.

Nancy Skinner of Daybreak International in Chicago - the person who had first suggested to DOE that it help Midwest communities after the flood - briefed villagers on how sustainable technologies could help them save money on roads, sewers and other infrastructure.

Alice Hubbard of the Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado, talked about how energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies could be used to "plug leaks" in Pattonsburg's economy, keeping local dollars at home.

Colin Laird of the Healthy Mountain Communities in Aspen, Colorado, showed slides of Village Homes in Davis, California, a 20-year-old sustainable community that features solar architecture, pedestrian-friendly layout, natural systems to handle storm water, and community gardens and green spaces.

Pliny Fisk from the Center for Maximum Building Potential in Austin, Texas, displayed building products he had made from recycled and remanufactured materials and spoke about using local resources in Pattonsburg's new buildings.

On Saturday, Milenko Matanovic of the Pomegranate Center for Community Innovation in Issaquah, Washington, began involving the community in the first steps of design. He led about 50 residents in a "Community Treasures" exercise. Matanovic coaxed comments from all of the residents about the qualities and physical features they most treasured in Old Pattonsburg - the things they'd like recreated in their new town. The result was a list of 21 attributes that began to define the villager's hopes for their new community, and that gave the design team its first guidance.

For the rest of the day Saturday and through much of Sunday, townspeople built on this list of treasures by breaking into smaller groups to discuss their needs and priorities. Tables were set up in the corners of the gymnasium, and villagers gathered around them to discuss issues with team members. One table focused on the plan for the new commercial district; one on civic buildings; a third table held a physical model of the new town site so that residents could work on the location of their new homes; a fourth table hosted discussions about energy efficiency measures.

Engaging Youth

Like many other rural communities, Pattonsburg had experienced an outmigration of young people. During the first meetings with the design team, residents made clear they wanted a town their children would choose to remain in to raise their families.

So on October 5, Matanovic, Jim Masker of the National Center For Appropriate Technology in Butte, Montana, and Chris Kelsey, an architect from Kansas City, held another Community Treasures exercise, this time with 150 school children in grades 5 through 12.

Charette No. 2

On October 13, 1994, the team returned with additional information it had gathered -- topographical maps; data on soil types, climate, prevailing winds; business and financial profiles. They started the weekend with a town meeting, reviewing the results of the adult and youth treasures exercises, and asking for additional input.

After the meeting, team members worked throughout the night to sketch the layout of a new town, and its physical characteristics.

On Saturday, October 14, the team held a true charette in the Pattonsburg gym. It spread its drawings over tables - one table for the proposed town plan, another for a physical model where residents could work on the locations of their homes and businesses, another table for the plan of a new senior citizens' center.

Team members set the stage with a series of short back ground presentations. David Tice of North American Resource Management in Charlottesville, Virginia, briefed the villagers on the soil types, wind and drainage characteristics and other terrain features of the site for the new town. Tice described existing foliage the team attempted to incorporate into the new town plan. Dhiru Thadani, an architect from Washington, D.C., described the preliminary town layout the team had designed overnight.

Then, the team invited residents to cluster around the tables and give feedback. Within minutes, the discussion in the gym grew to a roar as people pointed and commented and recommended changes. The team's artists responded by redrawing and moving pieces on the town model. The dialogue continued throughout the day. Saturday night, the team redrew all of its proposed plans, incorporating the changes recommended by the villagers.

On Sunday afternoon, October 15, the community reconvened for presentations of the team's work. When the presentations were over, the team promised it would return for a last workshop, after finishing a number of documents for the community, including a business plan, zoning recommendations and some ideas for business development opportunities.

Presenting the Plan

The team returned to Pattonsburg a last time on November 18-19. Team members described their final design recommendations for the town. Masker presented the community with a resource book of energy efficiency tips for home construction. Tice described an economic development planning software program that tracks resources flowing into and out of communities.

Cher Stuewe-Portnoff, director of the Missouri Division of Energy, and Peter Dreyfus, director of the Metropolitan Energy Center in Kansas City, presented the concept of conservation utility that would help villagers undertake energy efficiency projects.

In the weeks and months that followed, Pattonsburg resolved to adopt many of the ideas the design team had helped residents develop. Village leaders passed a sustainable development charter (reproduced in the "Codes and Ordinances" section), and created a sustainable business development corporation to attract "green" businesses to the community.

The community adopted the team's basic town plan, including solar orientation for all buildings and a pedestrian friendly layout in which the town center was no more than a five-minute walk from residential areas.