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Designing for change Architecture students at work in Bellefonte By Alice Crawley
Penn State Architecture student David Kinnaird (right) explains part of his group's proposed plans for Bellefonte to community members at the Oct. 31 meeting in Bellefonte Elementary Gymnasium. Kinnaird and 11 other architecture students create a master plan for Bellefonte to use in future planning as a class project in Christopher Diehl's course Architecture 431. Bellefonte community members participate in a discussion of Penn State architecture students' proposed plans for Bellefonte borough at Bellefonte Elementary Gymnasium. Penn State architecture students David Kinnaird (far left) and Didi Isovitsch (far right) explain their group's ideas for expansion in Bellefonte to community members attending a public forum on planning for the future of the borough. Christopher Diehl (left), assistant professor of architecture in Penn State's College of Arts and Architecture, talks with residents of Bellefonte, Pa., during a public forum where his students presented their proposed master plan for Centre County's county seat. Diehl teaches Architecture 431, a required course for fourth-year architecture students. Instead of assigning his students a hypothetical situation to study, he challenged them to create an urban design for a real community. During a public forum, Penn State architecture student Autumn Evans (right) discusses her group's proposed plans for Bellefonte with a community member.	Christopher Diehl, assistant professor of architecture in Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture, sat in his office next to a 3-D model of Bellefonte, Pa., glowing on his computer and described the course he would teach during fall semester 1999. Architecture 431, a requirement for all fourth-year architecture students, he admitted, would be a little different this semester. “Typically this course is hypothetical and in-house,” he said. “This time, though, we will be looking at a whole community, Bellefonte, with the focus on urban design.” Vice chair of the Bellefonte Historical Architectural Review Board and a resident of the borough, Diehl, like so many others in his town, realized the inevitable pressures and opportunities facing Bellefonte due to growth in Centre County and the completion of Interstate Route 99. “Growth is going to happen, and you can close your eyes or you can nudge it in a direction,” he said. With this in mind, Diehl assigned his students the task of creating a master plan that Bellefonte could use in future planning. His students included Didi Isovitsch, David Kinnaird, Kerry Larkin, Maria Basilico, Kevin Cummings, Nathan Fehnel, Katherine Antarikso, Laurent Hedquist, Thomas McGoldrick, Autumn Evans, Campbell Garratt and Richard Miller. To begin, the 12 students learned about Bellefonte’s rich historical legacy. Laurent Hedquist described as part of this legacy a man-made canal that branched off Spring Creek in Bellefonte’s Tallyrand Park. The millrace today is partly open and partly paved, but it once powered a paddle wheel at the nearby Gamble Mill. David Kinnaird mentioned the Academy, which was built in the early 1800s at the same time as Bellefonte’s Courthouse. The students studied Bellefonte’s assets, such as Tallyrand Park, and its drawbacks, such as very little parking. In addition, they conducted extensive interviews with 30 Bellefonte citizens, including business leaders, property owners, community activists and professionals in government, design and planning to learn about Bellefonte’s past and present qualities, as well as the various concerns and visions for its future. Many concerns centered on promoting Bellefonte’s unique Victorian architecture and maintaining its small-town atmosphere. Sue Hannegan, a historic preservation officer for Bellefonte borough, spoke of her own concerns and visions. “By maintaining the architecture and history, we maintain a wide and varied background,” she said. “Buildings speak to us about history. They tell us what people were doing and what their lifestyles were like. By all our actions and planning, we can keep the town vital and interesting and preserve it for the future.” Others expressed similar interest in revitalizing the downtown area for residents and tourists. Many looked toward Bellefonte’s Tallyrand Park as a borough focal point. Throughout the project, Diehl’s students corresponded with Penn State’s Hamer Center for Community Design Assistance. Created to assist communities across the state in planning for growth and change, the newly formed center provides a forum for discussing community needs, works on case-study research and offers the expertise of Penn State faculty and students to select Commonwealth towns seeking a variety of planning options. Michael Rios, director of the center, noted that any work done by the center requires active participation by the public. He added that in the work of Diehl’s students, citizen involvement would prove essential. “The community truly has to be a partner,” Rios said. The partnership between Diehl’s students and Bellefonte began with the initial interviews of select Bellefonte citizens, followed by a public workshop on Oct. 31, 1999, where nearly 60 borough residents turned out to view the large, colorful posters hung by the students around Bellefonte’s Elementary Gymnasium. The designs included representations of Bellefonte’s existing historic buildings, roads and parks, as well as blueprints for the future. Diehl greeted the citizens at the door, asking people to view the plans at their leisure and to then place colored blue dot stickers that he provided directly on parts of plans that they liked. The community response to the proposed plans was very positive. “The most wonderful aspect of the student’s work,” said Bellefonte Mayor Candace Dannaker, “was that they were able to paint a picture without any restraints. From those ideas, we are able to select what is possible.” She went on to say that “the students gravitated toward many of the same concerns that others have expressed over time. Some of the projects are already under way.” Bellefonte’s Match Factory figured in various ways in all the students’ work. Pat Casher, a resident of Bellefonte since 1980 and a self-employed consultant who works with Bellefonte borough, noted that the students’ ideas about the Match Factory came just as the borough began negotiating its purchase. Other innovative ideas included the addition of more green spaces, creating pedestrian-friendly walking spaces and ideas for alleviating existing or potential traffic problems, such as a change to one-way streets. Following the public’s response to their initial plans, the students spent the remainder of the semester completing a master plan that combined various ideas from their original work. The students then put their work on display in a window of the Brockerhoff Building on Allegheny Street, in the downtown district of Bellefonte. They also created a Web site for their plans. The students would like the borough to take ownership of the Web site in the future. Diehl said he felt the electronic medium would prove more beneficial than a written document, because the plans would not only be accessible to many people, but could also be easily altered to fit current borough needs. In exchange for their ideas and expertise, Kinnaird said, “We learned how to think in different scopes and scales. We’re used to doing one building where the site is an open field. Here we had to look at the entire borough.” Kerry Larkin added, “We had to fit people into the equation of design. Decisions we make affect everyone.” Didi Isovitsch noted how her work in Bellefonte had altered her perceptions. “After doing this project, I look at Penn State differently—from Bellefonte’s point of view. When you come to school here, you don’t realize that it is actually peoples’ hometown.” In addition to working with each other and Bellefonte community members, Diehl’s students also received input from Penn State landscape architecture and engineering students through Penn State’s Raymond A. Bowers Program for Excellence in Design and Construction of the Built Environment. The ongoing program allows the three disciplines to inform one another with their expertise as they would in the actual profession. Landscape architecture students of Rob Hewitt, assistant professor of landscape architecture, conducted a workshop with Diehl’s architecture students in the development of the initial master plan. Four architectural engineering students of Thomas Boothby, associate professor of architectural engineering, went on a tour with Diehl’s students in the Bellefonte Match Factory, providing structural assessments and advice on how to renovate the building. Hedquist expressed his investment in the project, noting, “Anytime you deal with the public rather than just the studio, you become more involved. It would be great to see our work come to fruition off the paper.” Judging from the enthusiasm with which Bellefonte’s town council received Diehl’s presentation of his students’ work—they asked him to leave the work up on the walls for a time for public viewing—the plans and circulating ideas are under serious consideration. In terms of resources available to make the plans a reality, Ralph Stewart, assistant borough manager, member of the Bellefonte Historical Architectural Review Board and an active participant in the administration of municipal affairs, shared the hopes of others when he mentioned private funding through corporations, partnerships and community grants. He added, “Bellefonte has already established a number of partnerships with various individuals and corporations that have been highly successful in the growth and progress of the community.” Speaking for his town and the promise of future relations between a university and a neighboring town, Casher said, “The community is so excited and grateful to the University. We hope it’s the start of a more permanent and long-term relationship.”