Twentieth-century architects built foam models and laid out blueprints to give clients a sense of their designs. When ECI/Hyer architect Brian Meissner presented the 10-percent vision of Homer's new city hall and town plaza last Thursday night, he just powered up his laptop computer, loaded Google SketchUp and took people on a tour of the first preliminary very preliminary design.
Photo by Michael Armstrong
Brian Meissner of ECI-Hyer discusses his architectural firm's 5-percent design of the proposed Homer Town Hall and Town Plaza.
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As Homer's latest big civic project moves along, the City Hall-Town Square Review Committee known as TSRC and the design and construction firms have been holding a series of public workshops and meetings. Last week, ECI/Hyer, Agnew::Beck Consulting, Corvus Designs and Jay-Brant General Contractors staff met with the TSRC, city officials and the Homer City Council to give them a taste of a city center to come.
SketchUp, a computer-aided design program available as a free, bare-vanilla program at www.google.com, allows architects to build computer models with walls, roofs, windows, and add terrain, trees even people walking dogs. Meissner, who also designed the award-winning Homer Public Library, zoomed in and out and around the projected image. Don't like the building on this site? He moved it 10 yards north. Want to see what it looks like from Pioneer Avenue? An image shows the peak of a two-story roof just rising above a stand of trees.
The plan has these features:
* Site: ECI/Hyer chose a site roughly in the area suggested last summer by the TSRC, on 10 acres of city land in the northwest corner of the Town Center area bordered by Main Street to the west and Pioneer Avenue and the Sterling Highway to the north and south. The city hall site looks east toward the library along a greenbelt by Hazel Avenue and has a view of Grewingk Glacier on Kachemak Bay. Set downhill from Pioneer Avenue, the roofline is low enough not to cork-off a view of the bay from the upper street.
* Plan: The council chambers anchor the northeast end of the building. A two-story shed-roof wing has a glass wall facing south. The sun warms an atrium and patio off the council chambers, and opens up to the Town Plaza to the east. The atrium connects the chambers to the rest of the building, including offices.
* Shape: Echoing some of the features of Homer High School "a little simpatico to the high school," as TSRC member Gaye Wolfe said the proposed city hall consists of shed- and gable-roof wings. Each wing is staggered on the south side, allowing rooms in several wings to have east or glacier views.
The challenge with the new city hall and town plaza is making them inviting and accessible to both drivers and pedestrians. An east-west road from Main Street to the complex is proposed, with eventually a north-south road to the Sterling Highway and possible another north-south connection to Pioneer Avenue.
Planner Chris Beck made an analogy between Town Center and the physics of suns, where the forces of gravity and mass push in and then heat pushes back out.
"What we're trying to do with this project I'm discovering has some of those qualities," he said. "We're trying to put into a relatively compact area a lot of uses."
"The central challenge we're working with here is try to bring enough stuff together so you sort of get like a good sun," Beck added. "If it's put far enough apart, it doesn't really catch fire and mean much."
TSRC member Kurt Marquardt suggested the Town Center should be a hub.
"I've always thought of it is as like a pin and all these connections as being like the spokes on a wheel," he said.
"It's stitching together the town," Beck said. "If this is done right, it shouldn't be taking from business, but enhancing businesses along Pioneer, Main Street, Old Town. It's a reason to come to Homer."
Corvus Designs landscape architect Peter Briggs made another analogy: Town Square is like a chocolate.
"On the coating, there's all this good stuff, but in the center, it's going to be your favorite filling."
Meissner continued with the sun analogy in his comments about Homer's public process in designing buildings.
"Uniquely Homer the compression of gases," he said. "That's how we feel when we go to these public meetings. There are all these ideas, and they're a very divergent community."
Homer has a collision of ideas about architecture, and the image of itself, Meissner said
"People love the bank (Alaska USA Federal Credit Union). They love wood and stone, they love the Old Town and the kind of nostalgic architecture," he said.
But Homer also looks ahead, Meissner added.
"Homer is the most cutting edge community that I know of, not just in Alaska, but in the U.S," he said. "There's something in the world that we have to do something about. It's about sustainability and it's about climate change. There's a lot of pressure that way, and a lot of pressure this way. It kind of converges in this way that's uniquely Homer."
Amidst all the talk of vision, Mayor James Hornaday threw a spanner in the works.
"I just hope we can pay for it," he said.
City Manager Walt Wrede said one way to pay for the city hall-town plaza is through grants and fund-raising. "When it comes to fund-raising, Town Square is going to have a lot more support, and it's going to be a lot sexier than city hall," Wrede said.
At the design team's presentation to the Homer City Council Monday, Mayor Hornaday suggested someone form a "Friends of the Town Square" group similar to the library's Friends of the Library group to help with fund-raising efforts.
The city and design team are working on an accelerated schedule in hopes of moving into the building in the fall of 2009.
To do this, a ballot measure regarding finance will hit council desks in mid-January, and a vote is scheduled for March 4.
Delays in the project at this point could have dramatic effects on its cost down the road, said council member Dennis Novak on Monday, as construction costs are going up by more than 10 percent per year. In a project this size, a one-year delay would add about $1 million to the overall cost, he said.
The next public workshop is Jan. 24. Information on the project is at www.homertownsquare.com. Meissner said a SketchUp file of the preliminary plan may go on the Web site so the public can explore the idea further.
Michael Armstrong can be reached at michael.armstrong@homernews.com.
