Designing an entrepreneurial village in a week

Welcome to the cool way to plan a town – the charrette – designing an entire community (complete with prospective engineering drawings and housing floor plans) in one intensive, collaborative week.

I happened by one of these today, but this is no ordinary charrette. It was being designed by one of the world’s preeminent town planners, DPZ & Company, and ‘produced’ by a development team with no less than the following vision, in their own words…

“…a place must be created that captures the imagination of the young, educated ‘creative class’. No longer seduced by office parks with out-dated marble lobbies, these workers are attracted to loft living and downtown intensity that reflects their self-image as ‘worker-as-artist’.

Rising from the cracked asphalt of an aging office park in north Rockville (Maryland) will be an explicitly green community of loft style units. Given the edgy moniker “Upper Rock District”, it is a neighborhood that can evolve organically – like the great American urban environments – able to respond to changes in lifestyle at home and in the work place.”

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neilkt