Aldermen, Board of

INTERNATIONAL DESIGN COMPETITION PRESENTATION NOVEMBER 22, 2011 A presentation was provided to the Board of Aldermen on Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chamber. Members of the Board in Attendance: Alderman-at-Large Brian S. McCarthy Alderman-at-Large Ben Clemons Alderman-at-Large Mark S. Cookson Alderman-at-Large David W. Deane Alderman-at-Large Barbara Pressly Alderman-at-Large Lori Wilshire Alderman Kathryn D. Vitale Alderman Richard A. Dowd Alderman Diane Sheehan Alderman Arthur T. Craffey, Jr. Alderman Michael J. Tabacsko Alderman Paul M. Chasse, Jr. Alderman June M. Caron Members not in Attendance: Alderman Mary Ann Melizzi-Golja Alderman Jeffrey T. Cox Also in Attendance: Tim Nickerson, Chairman, International Design Competition Jury Kimberly McCarthy, International Design Competition Jury Tim Nickerson Thank you. I will give you a status as to where we are with the competition; actually where we have been, where we are, and where we are going. This process has been a fairly long process, but before I get into that I wanted to actually at least just go into what is a design competition. There has been a fair amount of debate as to what it is. It is a unique concept so I wanted to at least give a little bit of a summary as to what that is especially since we have a few new members of the board here tonight. Basically design competitions are really organized whether by an outside organization or a government that really looks for information from the public to submit a design for a specific project. The jury creates the call for entries that details all of the information and the outline of the project itself, and then the winning design is chosen by that independent panel of design professionals and stakeholders. Sometimes there is a cash award, sometimes it is just simply bragging rights and for a number of different reasons. These are really used to just sometimes spark new ideas for projects, to really get some public debate going as well as to really generate the publicity to allow for even some of the new up and coming designers to really get some new exposure to things. Interesting to point out that really design competitions aren’t a new concept whatsoever. They have been around for thousands of years. The Acropolis in Greece was back in 2000 B.C. or somewhere around that timeframe was a design competition. Central Park, which is probably one of the most renowned design competitions, actually probably is the most world renowned design competition for landscape architecture, back in the 1880s designed by Boston’s own Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of the profession, which I like to point out, as well as Calvert Vaux, an architect that worked on the project. Then also fairly recently, back in the 1970s, this, which you may recognize, the Vietnam War Memorial. Sometimes competitions are controversial like this one was initially; however, it is bound to become quite positive and quite a moving experience. I actually just visited it again this past summer. International Design Competition Presentation 2 11/22/11 The competition itself for the Nashua International Design Competition began in September of last year. When the Labine building burnt down, I approached Kathy Hersh at the time to maybe focus on a design competition for that project itself. She then alerted me that the City was in the process of hiring Shadley Associates, a great landscape architecture firm out of Lexington, to design that project. And through some discussions with Kathy and then also Tom Galligani, the Economic Development Director, we came up with the idea of actually moving it from just the parcel of the Labine building to the Broad Street Parkway. As part of that process, legislation was passed in October to create the competition and then in January of this year, Mayor Lozeau appointed the jury. In March we had our first jury meeting and the process has been going ever since, pretty strongly. Tonight actually there is one other member of the jury Kim McCarthy, and we have a panel of other architects, urban designers, and local stakeholders from the community that are really invested in the Broad Street Parkway whether they agree with it or not; some do, some don’t. I think that is really important to point out is that regardless of whether you agree with the merits of the Broad Street Parkway, it is very much an improvement to the neighborhood and it has great potential to do that. These people, regardless of their opinion of whether it is a good project or not, are committed to seeing the project through to the best of that community and best of that neighborhood. Through the legislation, the jury was charged with doing several different things; one is develop the format of the competition. We have decide to create a blind one-stage competition and that is some competition jargon so let me finish and explain that a little bit. It is a totally anonymous competition. Competition entrants submit information to the jury, the jury has no idea who the people are, we have no idea who they are, the names and identities are all handled in-house through Community Development; all we see are the submissions and a number. We don’t want to have any bias like Sasaki Associates, they are a great design firm, I really like their work, oh this one is from Sasaki I’m going to give them extra points in my mind whether it be conscious or subconscious; don’t want to do that. It is also one stage where they are also submitting submissions and we judge it on that alone. There isn’t a follow up stage where they then are asked to refine their work and expand on things a little bit more. We also have the responsibility of developing the call for entries, which really outlines the submission requirements and the design criteria. We also have to evaluate all of the submissions and then select the winners, which is a fairly daunting process looking at it from the beginning of the stages. Throughout this, ad I’m not going to bore you with the specific details; however, there are specific requirements that each submission must have and things that we are looking for. There are a number of different plans. Unfortunately the colors do not come out on this projector so I apologize for some of that. All of the documents that we have, which I will go over, are included on our website for people to look at further. But there is a plan, which is on a very broad scale, basically a zoomed out view here, and then they also have to submit a detailed plan particularly with a couple different focus sections; one being the Central, Ledge, and Canal Street intersection and then also one where the Parkway then ends with the bridge crossing the Nashua River, including a number of descriptions and a design statement and so forth so there are a number of different things that we’re looking for, for that. As part of this process, back in August, the Board of Aldermen was very gracious in approving legislation for $5,000 in prize money for this. The jury has decided to actually frontload the prize money for first place only. We feel as if with a first place prize of $5,000 we are going to get many more higher quality submissions than if we were to tier it out into say $2,500, $1,500, ad then $1,000 for third place; however 2nd and 3rd place do get the notoriety and the bragging rights of being awarded 2nd or 3rd place. We also have in the call for entries the possibility of several honorable mentions. The legislation did call for the appropriation of $5,000 for materials for printing out boards and so forth. All of our submissions are electronic whether it be e-mail or on CDs or DVDs that are mailed to the Community International Design Competition Presentation 3 11/22/11 Development Division. There is a potential that we could have 100 or 200 boards or so, which would just be quite a daunting process for Community Development to handle so we are doing it all electronically and we’re only going to print out the finalists. The materials for that printing are being donated by jury members just so we can keep that $5,000 dedicated exclusively to prize money. There are a number of other steps from August going forward that we have to go through. The call for entries and the official start of the competition began in August. Just last week we had the deadline for questions. Whoever wanted to review the call for entries could submit questions to the jury and we were willing to answer them. There are times when they need to have additional information; some people just may have been a little unclear on certain things, so we had the option for questions. The deadline for questions was December and the submission deadline is January 11th, which is only a couple months away. The jury will be whittling down the number of submissions down to most likely 10. We will then be displaying those boards somehow publicly, most likely in downtown in a storefront or multiple storefronts and soliciting members of the public to review and provide comments to those electronically, through the mail, through the competition website and so forth. We want to hear what the public has to say as opposed to just the jury. There are a number of potential things that we could miss that we want to hear from members of the greater Nashua community. After the boards are displayed we will then review those comments and hopefully by mid March we will have our winner selected and all of our honorable mentions. Hopefully that will be the process. Getting the word out about this has been one of the most challenging parts. A full scale website has been designed; NashuaDesignCompetition.com. You can pull it up if you want. This is just a quick snapshot of part of the front page. There is a whole bunch of information on it. The call for entries is on here as well as the ability to ask questions. There are a number of different maps, electronic documents, tons of information available on this. That is one way we are getting it out there. We have also distributed information about the competition to all of the professional associations related to design professionals; the American Society of Landscape Architects, American Planning Association, the American Institute of Architects, and there are probably two or three more including all of the local chapters. There is also a number of competition websites; one is competitions.org that has information on design competitions around the world. We have been included on that website and they send out regular e-mail updates on deadlines and so forth. We had the ability to analyze the statistics of our website, and I can tell you that when that first result, when that first announcement went out on that competitions.org e-mail list, this website exploded. I wish that we had the colors on this, but since the launch of the competition, we have had almost 4,000 visits to our website including almost 1,300 repeating visits. The repeating is important because that means that there are people coming back and back and back again showing that there is clearly an interest to the competition, and that they really want to visit some more information. We have been visited by 99 countries across the globe, this one website, and these are the top 50. As you can see they are pretty much throughout. This is only half of them and across every continent except for Antarctica, which stats are not available. It is a pretty well breath of information. I can tell you the questions that have been submitted, we have probably received maybe 15-20 different questions through the website and I have even received some phone calls and e-mail addresses from Poland, Germany, Spain, China, Russia, Israel so there is definitely an international interest in this competition. When we put the tagline of international competition in this I was a little hesitant about that, didn’t think it might work, but figured we will give it a shot. I think it is pretty clear that that has been pretty telling. Even throughout the United States, and once again the colors don’t come through, 47 states have been, the darker the color the more visits there have been. So there has been a very high concentration in New York, Washington, California, obviously Massachusetts. Massachusetts is probably one of the hubs for design International Design Competition Presentation 4 11/22/11 professionals in the nation and in the world. Boston is one of the cores for architects and landscape architects in the world. There is even, looking at it in a little more detail, there is some clear interest in Washington where there are strong design schools for architecture, landscape architecture, and planning, and even in Iowa, in Ames, IA where there is Iowa State, very strong landscape architecture program that has really shown some strong interest in this. The next steps for this; in order to evaluate each of the submissions, which at this point we don’t know how many we are going to get, I have been involved in some other competitions as an entrant and they have received 150 – 200 submissions. I would like to think we would get that. I would be kind of overwhelmed if we did. It would be a great problem to have because we have to figure out how to whittle those entries down into something that we can actually truly analyze. We’re actually in the process of developing a standardized evaluation form. There are some pretty basic things; did you submit two boards that are of certain size, did you have the required sketches, did you have this and that. Those types of things are pretty easy. But we are then going to take it to another level where we are looking at the design criteria; did you address all of the design criteria in each of the different components successfully. Design is subjective. One person could think that something is designed incredibly impeccably well and another person standing next to you could think it is garbage. That is unfortunately the challenge with design is being able to address that subjective nature accurately, which I think just with the process, and Kim can correct me if I’m wrong, the process that we have gone through so far with the 9 members of the jury has been that we have sometimes some unique takes on things. There are some professional designers and some not so we look at it from very different perspectives, which I think is actually going to help us in the end. We have to develop those evaluation forms and then determine the finalists, display those finalists, solicit the various comments, and then determine the winners. So there is a fair amount of work ahead of us. Right now we are in that waiting period/holding pattern waiting for all of the potential submissions to come in. It is really kind of an interesting lull at this point, but really just by looking at the website statistics, we are really pretty energized by the potential and interest that is out there. Just the fact that there are over 1,600 repeat visits, unique repeat visitors is really pretty amazing. We will provide certainly updates as we get along further in the process and include some other groups as well, which I think are important when we get down towards the end. I think certainly involving the Broad Street Parkway Advisory Committee and groups such as that that are really keenly interested in this project a little bit more into it. The competition itself, and I probably should have mentioned this earlier, I do have a couple of calls for entries that I will pass around just so you can take a look at it if you haven’t done so already. We’re looking at the way that the Broad Street Parkway, which that plan is pretty rigid; we’re not looking at altering that at all, that is a give in the plan, how that Parkway then interacts with the local parcels, the other properties, how then the intersections somewhat work, are there small tweaks, are there abilities for people to gather, public spaces, opportunities for the current property owners to redevelop their properties to make it a more engaging more benefitting area for the local community in that specific neighborhood. There are a number of ways that people can address those things. Right now certainly all of the answers haven’t been developed yet. This one competition is one way for us to be able to get there and maybe spark some new interest and make sure that the project, regardless of whether you agree with it or not, is as successful as possible. With that, I am willing to answer any questions you may have. International Design Competition Presentation 5 11/22/11 Alderman Pressly I see some other members of your committee here. We would love to hear from them too if that is possible. Shall we let this young lady come up and speak? Tim Nickerson Do you have any particular questions or… Alderman Pressly I understand you were the photographer. Could you tell us a bit about how it was getting the pictures? Kimberly McCarthy I just went out one day. The first slide that we had, I was trying to get a more kind of illustrated image of it and more artistic version rather than just a straight photograph of the building as it because even though it is looking forward with the Parkway, it is still a very historic area as well. I was trying to capture more of the essence of it as it was during the time of the millyard running as the Nashua Corporation or the manufacturing corporation. Simply put, just went out, took some photos, and drew over it and tried to make it artistic and interesting looking. Alderman Pressly Did you share these photos with the applicants? What information did you give the people who are going to be submitting their designs? Kimberly McCarthy The information we provided is the information in that packet in your hand, and all of the information we put on the website as well, which continues with further pictures taken by Tim and James went out as well. Tim Nickerson As well as Al Wilkinson. Kimberly McCarthy Al Wilkinson as well. He is in the Picker building down in the millyard as well. Alderman Pressly I’ve heard of him. That is great. Kimberly McCarthy A lot of the photography was done by him, by Tim, by James, and that is all up on our website as well. International Design Competition Presentation 6 11/22/11 Tim Nickerson On our website as well we have a full map of the Broad Street Parkway just with GoogleMaps where there are different pinpoints with about 60 different photos because people that come and participate in the competition don’t always have the ability to come and visit Nashua and visit the place for what it is right now. The best way to do that is with the sharing of photographs. On our website there is a map that has basically pinpoints with 60 different photographs throughout the millyard and throughout our competition area to give people a true sense as to what the millyard is currently like. Alderman Pressly Thank you. President McCarthy Are there any other questions? Thank you very much for the presentation, and thank you for your work. Tim Nickerson Thank you, appreciate it. The presentation concluded at 7:23 p.m.