After our visit to Inspiration Kitchens – Garfield Park in Chicago, our Bruner Foundation team headed south to Kentucky to Louisville Waterfront Park. Submitted by Waterfront Development Corporation Inc. (WDC), the 85-acre riverfront park, which was developed over more than two decades, reconnects the city of Louisville with the Ohio River.

Waterfront Wednesday evening concerts draw crowds to the waterfront park.  Photograph: Wales Hunter, Nfocus Images

We arrived in Louisville to spring-like weather in time to join the city in cheering on the University of Louisville Cardinals men’s and women’s basketball teams in their national championship games. Louisville Waterfront Park is the largest and most established project among the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence finalists we’ve visited to date, including Congo Street Initiative, Via Verde and Inspiration Kitchens. We spent two and a half days on site, touring the park and meeting with WDC staff, board members, and consultants, as well as event sponsors and representatives from the design community and mayor’s office.

Festival Plaza and the Great Lawn offer spaces for large events and connect downtown Louisville with the river.  Photograph: Bruner Foundation

Louisville Waterfront Park has transformed industrial land along the Ohio River occupied by an elevated highway, sand and gravel companies, and scrap yards into a new riverside park and gateway to the city. Planning for the park began in 1986 with the creation of the WDC, a quasi-public agency that was incorporated to oversee the development of Louisville’s riverfront. WDC held a series of ten public meetings soliciting input on proposed development of the site that yielded a strong desire for green space. Subsequently, they initiated an international search for a design firm beginning with a Request for Qualifications to which 85 firms responded. Hargreaves Associates, one of four firms invited to Louisville to meet with WDC and city representatives to present its ideas, was ultimately selected to create the master plan and design for the $95 million park. Read more…

Previously, we wrote about Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural legacy and the relatively non-Eurocentric direction of Latin American modernism. While Niemeyer’s undulating buildings present unique restoration challenges, the U.S. is also facing trials with its own, typically rectilinear modern buildings. Looming large are the weather extremes of climate change and the quest for energy efficiency, making it apparent that the worst aspects of our mid-century buildings are their envelopes.

Designers of concrete and masonry architecture in our temperate zones often disregarded energy consumption and thermal comfort in the last century. Their buildings are a virtual list of today’s “don’ts”…too much glass, single-pane glass with an R-value of one, concrete thermal bridges with a flywheel effect in the wrong direction, zero insulation, and poor air and vapor barriers.

Elson Arts Center, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA
Perfectly rectilinear yet large single-glazed openings allow significant heat loss and solar heat gain. The school replaced the windows with new “oversized” insulated glazing units with low-emissivity glass, nearly doubling the R-value of the walls.

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