EveryVille 2008: Community beyond Place, Civic Sense beyond Architecture

Imagine every town. Remember where you grew up, a place shaped by
your first walk, your first love, your first amazement at color and form and
other people; your first humiliation when you couldn’t find your way or
weren’t part of the group. Recall the sights, the sounds, the dirt on the
street, the wind rustling through the trees, the day the garbage was picked
up and the day before that, the trip downtown or to the airport, the place
where what you knew slowly shaded over into an uncharted territory that
itself receded the older you became.

Maybe you still live in this city, or visit it because your family is there.
Maybe you never lived there but grew up in the countryside or in a
high-rise. Deep in our culture, however, is the notion that a small-scale
community, whether by itself or as the neighborhood in a larger city, is
at the core of what connects us not just to a place, but to a sense of
community. These days, such places arise and disappear much more
quickly than at any time in human history. If we cannot live there long
enough to make them our own, and if they cannot develop over time, what
makes them real places that create social and physical foundations for our
experience of the world?

Certainly architecture is not the answer, at least not in the traditional
sense of the word. It is unlikely that monuments or recognizable structures
such as churches or banks were ever anything either placeholders or late
appearances in the forming of community. It is the texture, the changing,
decaying and growing collective of built form that allows a community
cohere long enough to evoke memories. These days we wonder whether
we can create such communities virtually, or at a global scale. But what
if we ask the question the other way around and wonder whether the
techniques developed in the world beyond bricks and stone, wood, steel,
plastics and concrete, can help us shape a more ephemeral, quicker to rise
and faster to disappear, community. Can we build the character of place
instantly and let it fade away without fear?

Now consider the following situation:

EveryVille is a new exurban community that has emerged around the
intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the Southwest of the
intersection of Highway 1 and the Beltway around Megalopolis, about 20
kilometers from the city’s core.  Making good use of the flat, featureless
terrain that used to support dairy farming, developers have carved the
plains here into several subdivisions that by now house over 20,000
inhabitants. Analysts expect that the whole 25-square kilometer area that
used to be the historic Big A and Small B farms can eventually support as
many as 50,000 inhabitants and perhaps even more.

Along the edges of town, retail establishments have grown up, mainly
along the roads that lead from the interchanges off both the Beltway and
Highway 1. They include one shopping mall, which contains 25,000 square
feet of retail space, a strip mall with about 15,000 square feet of space,
and many smaller strip malls and fast-food outlets. A new Unified School,
housing 2,000 high school students, is under construction at Avenue Y
and W Street, while two small grade schools exist on Avenues P and S.
They are each designed to accommodate about 500 students. There is an
office park, Executive Park I, that has 7,500 square meters of fully leased
space, right where Avenue H links up with the Beltway exit. Another office
development, as of yet unnamed, but projected to have 12,500 square
meters of leasable space, is planned at the exit of Highway 1 onto Avenue B.

The land on which EveryVille is built consists of flat, clay-based soil.
The prevailing winds are from the West-Northwest. The temperature is
moderate, with occasional frost and snow in the winter and hot and humid
periods in July and August. There is a notable range of mountains, the
Tall Ones, about 40 kilometers to the North. Megalopolis is located at
a bend in the Medium River.  The main industry in the area is based on
telecommunication: there are several very large call centers in the region,
and the headquarters for Universal Telecom is on the Western outskirts of
Megalopolis. The total metropolitan area is approximately 2.5 million.

EveryVille was just incorporated as a separate town, with a City Council of
five members. The member who receives the most votes is the mayor for a
four-year term. The city is looking into establishing its own fire and police
departments. It is currently operating from the County Building, a multi-
purpose set of offices on Avenue R. Now the City Council has to decide
how to give EveryVille coherence and identity. In a heated meeting in
December of 2007, several factions proposed different strategies. Some felt
that there was no government necessary, but that a strong police should
operate from a monumental building that would have a jail attached.
Others felt that EveryVille should develop around a unified school building
that would eventually also have a (junior) college or trade school, and
that this campus should include civic functions. Yet a third group wanted
a more traditional city hall that would serve as the new community’s core.

But most of the participants felt that nothing of the sort was necessary, for
civic buildings were a waste of money and time. “We need a Starbuck’s,
that’s a real civic amenity,” was the final comment of the meeting. 

In the end, the City Council voted to hire an architect to decide the
question of how to give EveryVille a focal point, a place or method of
identity, and a home for shared services. They felt that architects would
have the expertise to determine whether any new buildings would be
necessary to do this, or whether what was really needed was a method
of creating common and shared space with a clear and distinct EveryVille
identity. The use of commercial spaces in this effort was to be included.
The Mayor in particular believes that what services there may be should
be integrated into the school, the office park or the shopping area, so that
they would be part of EveryVille’s everyday life, and that what is really
needed is a program that moves beyond buildings to create a character
for this community.  Above all else, she thinks that this character should
take the form not just of identity programs and focal points, but also of
guidelines that will help EveryVille grow as a cohesive, environmentally
sane and participatory community.

To accomplish this task, EveryVille has therefore set out a Request for
Proposals in which architects are asked to suggest how they might create
an image, a coherence, a character and a civic sense for this small town,
appropriate to its location and to its history, its site and its future. The
proposal can be idiosyncratic. It may even be utopian. It should certainly
be an evocation of a real place of community where there is right now
none and that may be again just a series of fragments in sprawl a decade
from, it should be an EveryVille of the imagination and of memory, of hope
and of fear.

The proposal must take the form of a series of drawings that will allow
citizens to see what EveryVille will look like in ten years, and how that
community will make sense through the medium of architecture:

• one jpg file (dimension: 945x450 pixel, max 200 kb) that will include several drawings, among which at least one 3D general view of the project (admitted techniques: photomontage, virtual-digital model, photos of the maquette, drawing, perspective)
• a text, English language, describing and explaining the concept of the project: maximum length 1000 characters (including spaces).
• one jpg file (dimension: 945x450 pixel, max 200 kb) that will include several drawings, among which at least one 3D detail view of the project (admitted techniques: photomontage, virtual-digital model, photos of the maquette, drawing, perspective)
• a text, English language, describing and explaining the project’s main details: maximum length 1000 characters (including spaces).

The deadline for the submission is July 15, 2008.

http://www.labiennale.org/it/architettura/everyville