East Frederick Monocacy Boulevard City-owned Property Development

Abstract

This course is part of the PALS program at UMD. PALS (Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability) is a campus-wide action learning initiative that blends customized coursework, faculty expertise and student ingenuity to tackle challenges facing Maryland communities. ARCH 407 is a collaboration studio – that is, a studio that joins graduate students from Architecture with graduate students from Real Estate Development to work collaboratively on a design project. The project for the Spring 2015 semester worked with community stakeholders and practitioners to come up with a plan for development of the Monocacy Boulevard site in Frederick, Maryland. This studio concentrated on the problems and theories of urbanism and urban design techniques in the context of The City of Frederick and the State of Maryland. Applied theories ranged from Landscape Urbanism, Neo-Traditional Design, Transit- Oriented Development, ecological systems and infrastructure, building typology, and street design. Through early semester research exercises and community workshops, ARCH 407 explored the relationships between cultural, social, and ecological systems in the built environment. The course introduced issues of field (architecture that reaches past its building envelope to shape landscape, ecology, culture, economy, and social behavior), environment, theory, tectonics, and assemblage. By applying fundamental urban design theories and sustainability principles, students proposed three schematic designs illustrated with graphic data conveying the variety of possible development opportunities.