November 11, 2020 — Meeting Transcript

say it's a lot of work and you guys have done I think a really nice job on what you've delivered here. So let's David, do you want to make any opening comments? Or should we just dive in? I

think we can go ahead and just dive in. So this is the second part of our conversation. The first one, of course, we talked about the development standards, which are kind of the zoning regulations that form the box speak of these buildings. Today, we're going to talk more about the design component and kind of get into the architecture and really get into some character preservation issues. We talked about especially along central Bemiston, Merrimack. And so I'm excited for the conversation and I'll go ahead and turn it over to Tim and John with H3 and they will lead us through a presentation. I will mention one other thing. Thank you to those who submitted comments. I did pass those along to H3. David Ensign, At the conclusion of today's presentation. Once again, send comments if you have them and we'll make sure that we go ahead and compile those and take everything David Ensign, Into consideration as we put together the draft guidelines. So thank you again to everyone who has submitted those today. And with that, I'll turn it over again to Tim and john John Gerstle, Thank you, David.

John Gerstle , And afternoon, everyone. As David mentioned, this is the second of the two meetings. And today, we're focusing on the design guidelines as well. Thank you for those comments. We're holding those comments. We'll wait for the comments that we get for the design guidelines and then we'll pack it together. But I wanted to emphasize just a couple of things as we went through because it really impacts the design guidelines tremendously that you're not doing typical design guidelines for downtown, you're doing design guidelines for this entertainment overlay district. And that's a very important component and these special zones. And although we adjusted the boundaries of the zone in order to ensure that we sort of to extend possible designing both sides of the street and getting unified groups, it really is important that we went back and we looked at the impetus that you can see on this slide from your current guidelines. So we've really taken the intent of these guidelines and the overlay districts very seriously in terms of ensuring the vitality and integrity of the area and the pedestrian friendly structure. Importantly, when you look to the goals, this is an extract from one of the overlay districts the importance of the smaller retail and service area. So again, we've structured these design guidelines to meet those objectives. How one creates essentially your core entertainment streets with small retail, but also the entertainment venues that you have as your overlay. So these guidelines are much more specific than you currently have, because that's the only way to be able to achieve these. So one big picture item that you can consider today is as we go through them and they're quite lengthy and I'll explain the key components of them and the reasons for doing it, it all leads back to the importance of this pedestrian friendly, the small retail and how to foster that entertainment district. In the broad scheme of things for the city of Clayton, these would be very particular. You wouldn't be expecting to apply these equally across the rest of downtown. This is a highly specific entertainment retail area that we've done these guidelines for. The other thing just to emphasize the entertainment component of it. Obviously you have the art fair which is nationally significant It's an enormous regional draw to your district. So this particular area somehow is the face of downtown Clayton in these particular times of the event. So it's very important to be able to accommodate the events as part of the design guidelines, but also it really leads to the importance that what you're creating here is a destination retail and entertainment area. You don't have sufficient households or rooftops, as they would say in retail parlance, to be able to support the scale of retail that you are engaged in. So in effect, people will be needing to be drawn into the area. So that was taken into account as well. So again, just how we'll go from here after the presentation, we'll send this entire presentation to you. And then perhaps by the end of next Friday, November 19th, you can submit the comments to David and then we'll get together with the city and have a formal response back to you. So leading into the draft design guidelines, we've organized it into nine sections. And it's rather sort of classical way you would organize it. basically the overall objective of the design guidelines and any definitions, a set of design principles, we call them design excellent principles, and then into the district scale guidelines, the architectural scale guidelines, building elements and materials, landscape guidelines, public art and environmental design guidelines, And then normally you will have a coordination with the broader land use tables for the rest of the city. So we won't go through number nine today, but we'll go through the rest. There's some stopping points along the way to take general questions and observations, because going through guidelines one by one can get relatively tedious. Unless you, an urbanist like us, you get really excited about this type of thing. Well, do your best to explain the reasoning behind it, not go through the detail as we move through. But I wanted to just start off with the objective. So remember, you've already dealt with massing under the development standards. That gives you the scale of the projects. The design guidelines allow you to develop the character of the district and really get into the architectural components of it. These two things have to work together in order to achieve a successful result. And again, given the center part of this, that this is the core of your downtown and a destination retail, the importance of achieving design excellence as well as the vibrant, attractive and human scale downtown entertainment district which you've already determined. The second paragraph really, again, reinforces that this is an extract from the entertainment district zoning And at the end of the day, what you're trying to do in terms of the architectural view is to ensure that the project design contributes to the distinctive character and identity of the area, achieves positive human scale pedestrian orientated experience, and then encourage the architectural diversity and contextuality. You don't have a single architectural style in this area. So we've certainly supported the idea of the range of architectural styles within this. We've outlined six design excellent principles. These are overarching things you would be looking for. Importantly, human scale buildings at the architectural scale. And it's very much a compositional thing as well. So the idea of human scale through the organization and scaling composition of the architectural elements. Why this is important, and you'll see as we move through, the buildings you're getting proposed in the district or have been recently built are much larger in floor plate size than your current stock of buildings, right? And this is pretty standard. you're getting buildings proposed that are quarter of a block scale, half a block scale and full block scale in some cases, which are then replacing 10 buildings. So one of the challenges is how do you achieve a human scale with these larger footprint buildings as well as being larger in scale? And part of the design guidelines deal explicitly with that case. The second design excellent principles activate the public realm. You've stated you want a vibrant entertainment district, it has to be walkable, it has to sit-able and comprise of smaller scale retail. And the smaller scale retail is important because if you have one retail venue occupying half a block You have one front door in half a block, as opposed to what you would have today, which would be five or six different retail establishments in half a block. Each with their own doors and the coming and goings that is important. So how you create and ensure smaller scale retail is very important. And how the buildings on the ground level relate retail to the street is very important. I'm going to emphasize as we go through, designing retail environments is very particular art. And we've integrated some of the best practices of retail design into the design guidelines as we move through. However, supporting good retail stores are great streets. And so here again, and this is the right-of-way, which is in the a jurisdiction of the city. But in this entertainment district, it will be important that the streets are designed, the streets themselves are designed to support retail and be flexible for venue. You already have the events that you have. And as you remake the streets, you should be designing for those events. And part and parcel of that design of streets is the idea of the pedestrian walk zone. If you think of retail areas and great streets, there are parts of the sidewalk that you would have outdoor dining. There are parts of the side walk that you would want to walk unobstructed, and this is really important for universal accessibility. And then there are parts of a sidewalk that you want to linger and look in the street, stop and have a conversation. So sidewalk design is very, very important and retaining these pedestrian free walk zones through the sidewalks are important. And we'll come back to that as we move down. The fifth design excellent principle is district identity and character. And there's a quote in one of your documents that this has been and should continue to be the social heart of the city. And so that each building has to create participate in creating that distinct and memorable area and destination. So to that end, what we are trying to avoid is large monolithic facades and flat top buildings, right? So what you're trying not to do is just extract the zoning code. Why this is important is the architectural review board has the opportunity to increase the range of flexibility and modify that building height to create greater architectural identity. And that's what becomes an important notion as you're doing the building development standards, you're looking at the architecture and seeing how those two things interact. And then finally, The importance of architectural distinction, that the buildings you have here should be really fantastic buildings but contribute to the district. They must be compatible with the other buildings. The district doesn't have a unified architectural expression, but there's a certain ambience in it. And buildings need to defer to that ambience as well and how they relate and adjust to the buildings. Because not every building is going to be replaced in the district in the immediate foreseeable future. So how new buildings and old buildings adjust to each other is very important from the architectural side. Those are the first two components. Just any thoughts or questions on the objective and the principles at this stage before we get into much more detail of the district and the architecture.

I'm just, I don't think I heard number four somehow. Did we miss that?

So one, two, three,

the connected

pedestrian zones. The sidewalk zones. Any other thoughts at this stage?

Sounds like what we want.

Okay. So I'm going to move through the district and architectural guidelines all as one. This is more lengthy and more detailed. And without, I'm not going to read them all because you're going to get this and you're going to have a chance to reflect on them and comment. I thought I'd go through them and talk about why we suggesting they be here and what the key elements are for them. And then you'll be able to wordsmith and add to it and suggest removal of things as you review this. But again, I wanted to start off that we have looked at all your guidelines that you have for this area and made sure that all your current guidelines are incorporated into the work that we've done. So nothing gets lost from your current guidelines. In fact, what we've done is you'll see we've added significant detail to them and actually tried to operationalize them in that sense, give more specificness to them. And that will be something that you would like to look at and like to look if we've been too specific or not enough. The other thing that I want to say is nothing you will see today uh, hasn't been tested in other city venues. In other words, we've also done a lot of precedent research to look at design guidelines and other equivalent retail areas where you're trying to achieve the same type of thing. So there is a lot of background research to these. We just didn't sit here and sort of dream them up. as we move through. These are pretty much standard practice in other cities. So at the district and site level, we have five components, views and vistas and skylines, gateways and entrances, sidewalk activation, sidewalk design, and temporary uses. So the district and site specific are really obviously with us as a notion of this is an identifiable district, how one thinks in frames out there that district. So we start off with the skyline views and vistas and your skyline has been evolving over time. And obviously as you increase the verticality of your downtown the tops of the buildings and the skyline becomes important. But at the same time, the taller buildings need to be strategically placed, designed and identified one from a view from afar. And secondly, given the type of shadows they will cost and the impact they will have on the streets, you would want to be very deliberate about how and where the towers are placed as you move down as well as where you step down on height because downtown comes up against the adjacent neighborhoods, as well as many existing buildings are side by side of the towers. So in terms of the guidelines, sorry, let me go back. For each one of these guidelines, we state an intent upfront and then we give you the guidelines. as a list below there. So for every component, there's an intent and a guideline. So what we're suggesting is that you try and create a guideline, a skyline that's varied and textured, and that the placement of the towers are really relevant from your public spaces and the street level. And to the extent possible, you limit the number of flat top buildings and what we call the extrusion of the maximum massing. So what you're trying to do is not have an entire downtown where someone's built to the maximum height and then chop the building off, right? And so this is where your height regulations must intersect with the intent of trying to create great tops of buildings. and a distinctive skyline. So you need to, as you review projects, look at the tower placement orientation heights and size, and you've just gone through a project approval where the project had two towers. So when we say that one project can have two towers, so do you make them identical towers? Do you adjust the towers? You see an example on the right-hand side with towers are different heights. You can see how you can place them. So you need to be very deliberate in your thought process of not just extruding one or two towers on there. You should look at the ability to have unique geometry of the towers and not, again, simple extrusions of the block and how you modulate and articulate those facades. The rooftop design is critical. That's your skyline impact. And then you need to understand the night lighting of them, how this transforms. Again, these are guidelines that are trying to create the ambience of an entertainment district and a retail district that operates at night. So how one thinks of this is very important from a night perspective. The second district guideline is the idea of gateways and entrances. And clearly you have a series of entrances from the neighborhood side along Maryland, but also you have a very distinctive center part around the public buildings of city hall and the county buildings. So that sets up certain sites within your district that again have a great opportunity to bring some distinctiveness to the design. And clearly, the corners of the buildings at the major intersections of the street could in fact be celebrated and identified with it. And so one has to really begin to look at how you craft the base of the building the first three to five floors of the building on the corners so that they become prominent from two or more corners. And then the other idea is that you can actually think about the entirety of the buildings having a chamfered corner and places together. Corners in cities are really quite interesting places. They tend to have great entrances to buildings or great retail establishments, They're great places to sit. And so beginning to have that as an identification becomes very, very important. And we'll come back to the corners when we look at the architectural guidelines. And then broadly, the sidewalk activation, again, about the vibrant retail and entertainment streets. And this is where, under the guidelines, retail thrives in well-designed manage streetscapes and public spaces. So if you truly want great retail, you have to have great sidewalk design and street design. And the ideal sidewalk width for the type of retail you're looking for is somewhere between 16 and 20 feet, right? If you were doing a more major boulevard, say like Michigan Avenue and Chicago, your sidewalk would be more towards 20 to 25 feet, right? So the type of small scale retail, the type of entertainment, the type of outdoor thing, you're really looking for this ideal sidewalk size. If you can get that sidewalk size, you really are beginning to foster that public life. The sidewalk is wide enough to have outdoor dining, to have lingering spaces, looking at the design of curved bump outs of really important conditions. And then finally, the idea of adding the retail spillover space and that fact that retail can emerge from the front. And if you look at the top left-hand image here, the idea of how retail can really open up to the sidewalk design has been very important, right? So we need to ensure that with the right size of sidewalk you can support the type of retail you're looking for and that you allow retail to spill out of the stores as well. Yet providing in the top right hand image shows this very clear and ample space for pedestrian flow. Full universal accessibility is essential in all of these. So how you zone the sidewalk for outdoor dining, spillover, and I'll just sort of illustrate. So outdoor dining here, the walk zone, spillover retail can be there, all become very important in the design of the sidewalk activation. The frequent transparent and operable doors, the importance of the retail opening out to the front becomes essential. And then as you move forward, the balconies above the retail, the buildings above you, and you can see that in the top left-hand slide, they also activate the street. So it's really important as you move in those first five floors of your base of your building, that it's all orientated to creating that really vibrant and exciting retail area. So the texture of the materials, the balconies, the signage, all becomes really important for that sense of vitality that you're trying to do. And then again, just sort of building upon that, we just focused on one street, which is Central Avenue, which should be designed really as your unique street. It is your special events street and that you should begin to think of how you can achieve that type of size of sidewalk and ambience. And this is the existing, as you can see, Currently, you have about eight feet effective sidewalk once you take the amenity zone, which is that four feet where the trees are out of it. And having parking, the majority is orientated to the vehicle. With only 32% orientated to the pedestrian and perhaps of that 32%, more like 26% is orientated to pedestrian activity once you take the amenity zones out, you don't have sufficient area to create that great retail street. So one opportunity that you can consider is that you can essentially remove the additional lanes out of the street. You must retain the parking spaces, retail spaces, needs those parking spaces either side. But if you can do that, you're really moving into the 16 foot wide effective sidewalk. And whether you put the programming next to the building and you walk next to the amenity zone or you walk next to storefronts, and have the amenity zone that you saw previously is really a greater level of design detail as you move through. And then again, we think that this would be a great opportunity to do because at the same time as you can do this, you can actually address this being a really effective venue space, getting rid of the curbs and putting in the necessary infrastructure to support venues. So amenity zones are very important. And then finally, in terms of the district, the ability for you to design and have the retail supported by these temporary uses and events are what's key to ongoing retail and entertainment districts. I think you could not consider this an entertainment district unless you had the opportunity to be able to provide these type of Gernot Wagner- Event spaces and temporary uses. So moving from the district wide down to the actual architectural guidelines. Now we at the project scale and we have quite a number of these and will run through them. And again, I'm going to emphasize a couple of key ones on this. Gernot Wagner– So, Gernot Wagner— Let's move in there now stop for questions after this. So starting with compatibility, what we mean by this, it's responding to that most new projects will be in full development. And therefore the design should respect some of the existing character and scale of the adjacent development and overall character of the street. Not everything's going to be replaced in the district. and how new buildings meet and adjust to existing buildings is something that the architectural review committee should be really thinking through. And there's a couple of scales that we want you to think this through. The idea of the small scale retail screens you're trying to foster, you need to really think of the ground level of any new development as one way of linking these things together. And then secondly, you need to think of how they about each other in terms of height. And the second point goes immediately to that, which we think that you should require a sunlight impact study for all new development as understanding what that means to the public spaces. Because what you're trying to do is ensure minimal negative impact on highly active sidewalks, meaning those are those key places where you have the retail clusters. And you are quite lucky in the orientation of the blocks. Clearly central is orientated to the extent north-south, so you get nice sunlight down there. So you get shadow, you get an east and west shadow in there. But obviously something like foresight, you're going to get the sunny side of the street and you're going to the cold side of the street. And you can see that, I'm sure you all know that when you walk around when there's snow on the ground, you see where the snow melts first and doesn't slide. So understanding as a condition of what new development does to the sidewalk is very important. And there's lots of things one can do. The last bullet point in the transition to adjacent building and sensitive edge condition. I mean, I think it's quite interesting if you look at the salon development on central that was done. The area adjacent to the lower building was actually set back and matched in with us before they went into the higher portion of there. So the recessed portion of the building was on the side that met an existing building. So we would say, yes, that's beginning to try and be a little bit more sensitive to adjacent buildings and scale. So there is good examples even within your districts to be doing that. The second and probably one of the most challenging of all of this is the building and facade scale. So this is trying to deal with you having much larger floor plates size buildings, right? The quarter block, those half block buildings, the full block buildings. How do you achieve in this entertainment district where are you trying to develop a smaller scale retail? It becomes essential that you avoid long blank homogeneous and monotonous facades. So facade, uh scale is really important this is not something unique to you just be let's be clear this is happening in all other major cities and all the design guidelines are also trying to deal with this and in for the very same type of reason so as you look at the guidelines the first thing is where possible develop the smaller lot increments. So if you have an opportunity not to have these enormously large floor plates of one full size, go that way. Keep a greater variety of smaller buildings is your first opportunity here. Into the building composition, it becomes really important on how you overall compose that and you can see some examples to the right hand side. But one, you want to clearly differentiate the base, the ground floors, the middle floors and the roof. And that is a fundamental basic differentiation that you should have between them. There are two main strategies for dealing with these very large footprint buildings. It's called mass variation and facade articulation. Wherever possible, you want to use these together. But primarily you try and vary the mass of the building. So I'm gonna just sort of pause and explain this a little bit relative to the image on the left. But mass variation, so overly simplistically, this is a full block building, right? Mass variation reduces the actual mass of the building in scale. Well, on average meeting the developed standards. So that's very important. What they've done here, they've made this one height, they've made another height and they've made this another height. So that's mass variation. And what one would do in negotiation with the developer, if for instance, they could build all of this say to five stories. If they did a mass variation like this, parts of the building could be six, parts of the billing could be four. So you still get an average but you get the building not just as an extruded block cut off top. You're getting texture and you in this case They made the compromise to get an outdoor space here. And this is why I put in here on average meeting the development standards. And this is where the intersection of architecture and the massing has to work for you to get an interesting buildings out of this without a bias to the developer. So that was, so essentially you got one building height There. And you've got another building height here, right? And then you've got another build height there. And you've an open space there. So this is a good example of mass articulation. And you want to get as many of the larger footprint buildings doing this first and foremost. The second strategy which you like to overlay on this is facade articulation. So methods to reduce the perceived mass of the building, human scale components, right? And here what you can see, even in this lower mass building, they broke up the facade into three distinctive facades. One, two, three. And so you can see how you can then start to develop a scale that you would never have a sense of that building bigger than a certain size. And I'll give you those sizes as we move through in detail, but this is a very good example. And then the last one is upper floors. They should be distinguished to the base and they can also be articulated to reduce the perceived bulk of the building so in this case the top floor was pulled back and you probably can't see it too easily from across the road right and again with the idea that you can use that meeting the average development building height and allow some parts to be higher, this level can be higher because it's pulled back and you can't appreciate it from the street. And so the developer ultimately gets their full amount, the development standards allow, and you get a well-crafted piece of architecture out of this. That's to the human scale. Now, keep going on all of that. Facades longer than 70 feet need to be varied into smaller segments or parent faces. So what we're saying is the biggest piece of facade that looks like a unified facade should be 70 feet in length. And this is their slight variations in standard and best practices from around the country. I went out and measured your length of some of your facades in the districts, some of the older buildings, and tend to think that 70 feet is about right. It's about the right scale that you can get enough sense of variety in the block of your building. So that becomes an important component, as well as you have to change the wall plan. So you can't make it like an applique. Do you know what an applique is? It's just everything in line. It's like sticking something on a box. You have to vary the box. You have So wherever you change so-called facades of buildings, you step it away. They change the plane. They go in and out as well. So your box isn't just a stick on glue different materials, right? It's actually textured and orientated to do this. And that becomes very important. And then finally, you vary the skylines. a minimum of 30% of the length of it. So you also start to get some texture in the skyline. As you can see, all of this requires that architectural review happens simultaneously with the review of the development standards because ultimately you want your architectural guidelines to modify the box the zoning box, right? And this is kind of how you do it as you move forward. And this is just a diagram of that theory where the left hand is what you don't want, the right hand is what you want. And this all can be done as a single project development as shown before. And then again, how you vary these, how much texture that happens, the sense of materials of all of these are all part and parcel of working those out. But the great architecture that you can make and the sense of vitality you can make comes through the design guidelines and modifies the zoning bias. We continue to modify that zoning box, particularly if they're on the corners. And what we are suggesting tied back to that district is that there be signature design elements at district gateways and on prominent corners. They can be vertical as you see in the top left, they can be chamfered on the top right and the bottom right here, but somehow they need to be responding to the corner condition and they need to respond both at the top, the middle and the base. And that should link in with your sidewalk design. Moving on to the base of the buildings. And this is very important because we're leading up to creating a base of a building that can adequately accommodate quality retail design. So again, if I'm just jump back to represent the first design guideline in this, if you look at this right hand side, the idea that they are subtle variations in the base height and size in this is important. And that that is what the first guideline is trying to get. As you look at any traditional street, none of the buildings quite line up where you put awnings, where you put overhangs, how you do this, or should add a series of textures. In fact, if you looked at the top left-hand image here, it would have been more interesting had the awnings not been all at the same height and been of the same design. In fact, you want to encourage that texture because this looks just as one big, one establishment where you are trying to encourage the sense of smaller retail and accommodating that. So one has to be very careful about ensuring the base can accommodate a great variety of design scales. So that's the second point. The base of the building needs to be flexible, sufficiently flexible to accommodate a variety of store design options. One of your challenges here as you move forward, your buildings aren't placed for many, many years. We're going to go through many reiterations of retail. Retail is a fickle business. Your restaurants get replaced frequently. The architectural review board, you need to be putting understanding how retail operates such that when the project comes in, you feel comfortable it is meeting the best practices of retail design that will allow retail to come and go in that area. And it's an important idea, that's why we put this word in needs to be sort of flexible. And it would be ideal to know ahead of the game what type of retail the project is encouraging. But these are small things and I'm not gonna go through each one of them, re-enforces the idea that you're trying to get a variety of setbacks, projections, identity related to each of the retail areas and ensuring some type of weather protection and seasonal variation as you move forward. So those all are trying to in fact address avoiding the top left hand image and encouraging At the retail scale, this variety of texture on the bottom left-hand side. So let's move into the ground floor and retail design. Where most of this information comes from is retail design best practices and how one really tries to create a space for retail to move. So obviously the first one, is no ground floor residential office here, right? This is about retail and entertainment. The retail height, the height of the ground floor for retail is vital. In the ideal world that space should be 15 feet. If you were to go and try and get top-end retail into this area, they would want about 15 feet because clearly in retail, the higher ceiling is important. They hang things off it. They've got displays. Obviously, there's all the mechanical that's exposed. You would never, ever go below 12. as you move this. But 15 is the ideal and is the contemporary standard as you move through, as you go into retail. It would be ideal if you understood the desired retail tenant mix. So who are you trying to attract to your entertainment district? I've made certain sort of assumptions that you that you would want. And again, that's what's leading off the 15 feet. So as an entertainment venue, you can't do an entertainment venue comfortably in 10 foot ceiling heights. So this is why you have to meet the contemporary standards. Retail stores and particularly restaurants, food establishments and entertainment uses have to be serviced from the back. and have very particular MEP, mechanical electrical and plumbing requirements. Just in an entertainment venue the number of air exchanges are very important. You can think of restaurants kitchen extracts. When you review the projects and they show retail on the ground to understand how these are being serviced, can they be serviced and how the MEP is actually being utilized. All of this, if it's not done at the head of the project will limit the type of retail you can attract to your project and therefore to this area. And so this is why we were taking this component quite seriously. You've been stated about restaurant row. You would like more restaurants, small eateries, entertainment places. They require the higher degree of serviceability than the small mom and pop store selling particular goods. So the type of retail is, let me say it the other way. Whatever the type of retail the developer shows in terms of the building projects coming through will limit the type of retail you can attract to your street. Hence, the retail is vitally important for detailed review. So we'll continue with those guidelines. Avoid irregular shape retail units, right? A very simple retail is a rectangular one. It's normally of a storefront ratio of one to three. The width of the front facade one, three of those back would be a typical small scale retail. That would not be a typical restaurant. It would not be a typical entertainment venue. So we've also put in there the idea of the larger stores and how we were thinking also a little bit of the entertainment areas. But one of the challenges of large-scale stores is they still typically have one entrance. So you can, instead of having five entrance doors and five retail establishments, you have one with one door. And you can see that playing out in your district at the moment. So this is an example of how one could actually begin to think through if you had larger retail in the area. And always remember that retail is designed for three miles an hour speed, right? Walkable speed and lingering. So that creates a whole different relationship to the street. And then critically important is a porous edge. One of the things about retail, you have to be able to see into the store. So we saying that for each of the projects, you should have at least 75% of the facade of the ground floor must be windows and doors. You must be able to look into it, 75% of the length. If you think about that, in half a block development, 25% of that block you can't see into. 75% of that block, you must be able to see into the stores. You should create as many multiple entries as possible. That means smaller stores are better. And best practices suggest an entry for active vibrant areas every 20 to 40 feet. So that creates enough flow and generation of activity. The entrance must be visually enhanced. You must know that's the entrance of that. And when the retail comes to the corner, you should wrap the retail frontage into the corner. Why this is important is if you look at your alleys in the district, they're quite large. In fact, in Salon, they actually widen the alley You don't want, as you're walking down your retail street, you don't want to see blank wall edges and services. So you wrap it around. And so as the alley is exposed, you still see into the corner. And then finally, you have ancillary activities, meaning that you want there to be vending. You want people to come out. So the bottom left-hand corner is just one example of can you come out and the bottom right hand corner shows how your storefront design is everything that you have in your retail, how open it is, how flexible it is. All of this becomes your project includes how you organize your storefront design. So because in retail business, retail changes, you have the opportunity that maybe your storefront changes over time. And so that at least the retail has to maximize the visibility into the interior. So you can actually see that again, that's the bottom right. You have to obviously be sensitive to security but then it's really important that the glass that you use provides optimum transparency. So you don't want any tinted glass, et cetera, for these. So storefront design becomes critical. And then the last image on this particular one talks about retail at night. This is an entertainment district. The lights need to be on. How you structure that at night is very, very important. And there's a series of guidelines here. So the architectural lighting of stores should not be an afterthought and it's very, very important for you to create that sense of vibrancy at night as well as that sense of safety as you move through. And then jumping from the base Back up to looking at tile placement and design. Very important, again, that to the extent you can, you limit the floor plate design in terms of the size of that. Again, the issue of scale and shadow becomes important. The utilization of geometry. Rupert Clayton, Increase the range of heights. I think it would have been interesting in your current development on the top right hand side if you had thought of should the towers always be the same. Should they be very and that's a type of discussion one should be having Rupert Clayson, Of that, and then the idea of the apparent face. Rupert Claytoon, Of all of this. If you can, if you look at the top right hand the entire tower would be considered as one facade. When you look at the top left hand, you can see that they're trying to articulate the tower of different facades and different scales. And again, similarly on the bottom right hand side. So you want to increase, as the size of the tower increases, you want to limit And the idea that it's all one thing and have a greater degree of texture and orientation. And then looking at roof and setback use being in an entertainment district. It's great opportunity for roof terraces and the idea of occupying the roofs of the buildings at multiple heights and how that contributes to the excitement of the area. The top left hand is just as an example, the rooftop on the moonrise on the loop as the example, but encouraging active uses. Clearly you do not want to be able to see these roof terraces from the street So it becomes important and there's a series of regulations here of how you set the terraces back because obviously there's safety and all sorts of things that go in once you occupy higher levels. And the principle being is from the opposite side of the street, you don't want to see hand railings of the roof terraces unless it's integrated into the design of the project. If there's a roof terrace that's not integrated into the design of the facade, they need to be set back. And then, of course, you've still got existing buildings. You might have additions to them. You might have part additions adjacent to them. So that's the top right hand side. And you might have additions that sit on top of them to be able to utilize the higher venue or the higher development standards that you have. And so there's a series of guidelines on beginning to be able to do that. So that takes us through the district and architectural guidelines. I'm gonna just stop here and take some questions or thoughts.

Hey, John. This is Steve. I have a couple questions in that architectural guideline area. When you were talking about smaller lot increments, you were not saying they should be owned or developed by separate developers, were you? That they could just appear to be separate lot increments? Is that

correct? That first bullet point, I was I was trying to indicate you should support the retention to the extent possible of the smaller incremental developments.

But could it be, say, a single developer just breaking up the building and the facade scale to look like multi-developments?

Yes. And that's what... This section tries to. Yes.

Okay. The second question was about the ground floor use and retail design when you mentioned wrapping retail around an alley. Knowing our alleys, some of them have level changes. They appear to be dark at night. Is there a way to enliven the alley itself where you might get people using it in some way? We've seen that in other cities, but I'm not sure how it could be done.

Two things to that, Steve. Yes, we support that sensitivity to the design of the alley is very important. I'll just tell you from my mind as when I come down into this area, I always walk through the alleys because I end up parking on some other street and I walk through the alleyes. So in my concept, in my daily life of experiencing your district, alleys are just part and parcel. So yes, you should be sensitive to that. That particular guideline was trying to address, as you walk, if you are walking down central and the alleys are quite wide, you, as you're walking, that sense of continuity, if you wrap, and I think I said it's 20 feet, let me find it. that is at the bottom of the second to bottom point, include the first 20 feet of the secondary facade. So all I was suggesting, say if there's a window, you wrap the window 20 feet down into the alley. So when you're walking, you see the storefront, right? I'm not suggesting you have access or anything else from the alley, but because the alley corner is so important to the continuity of your retail street, You need to address the corner of that and not just allow that to be a service area. So it's yes to both answers. And later on, we say that you should consider your alleys as an important part of the pedestrian network.

Okay, then I had one more right now and we can go on to someone else. When you were talking about the varying heights and masses and you actually drew on that, I don't remember which one it was. There, yes. What we are seeing is the potential building of more, Wood frame buildings, five stories over a concrete base that can usually be underground. With this suggestion, it's sort of leaning to less than five feet on a street facade and higher, five stories and higher than five stories sort of toward the back of the site. If that is the case, then we're potentially forcing the developer into a different type of construction. And I'm not saying that's not bad, but it seems like we would be then forcing them to go a different direction, which is okay in my mind, but is that okay from your planning point of view?

Yes. Because if it's just a technical extract or extrusion of the zoning diagram, or the technicalities of cheap building, or the most efficient building I should say, building system, you're going to get nothing more than flat top extruded buildings. And what we suggesting here, Steve, is not unusual for any city to be required. So just to be clear on this, this is not some scale of design regulation that many cities aren't asking to create these human scaled street environments of the smaller scale elements and more textured scale elements.

Well, I like that idea. I think we have to really consider how to implement it and come to terms with what developers may be looking to do.

And when you

see where

timber technology is going, Steve, A building much higher buildings in five stories.

Yes. So if you go to, yeah, if you go to heavy timber. But it seems like we've had some lightweight would framing and I think that is five floors maximum Right. Well, we'll have to look into that but very good point. I think your graphics have really been very helpful. That's it. PB,

Harmon Zuckerman, Any other thoughts or questions and do we keep moving. Hella Pannewig-

I actually just real quick. I wanted to go back to the sidewalk with just for a second. Hella Panewig- It wasn't clear to me if we have the width to make expanded sidewalks. Hella Panrewig- Yeah, I, I, you went through that pretty quickly. I'm afraid Hella Panrewg- We have the opportunity to do that.

Hella

Panwerg- Yes. Okay. It's really brilliant.

So this is North Central, the image that you have now. And what you have now is essentially eight feet. This is what's called an amenity zone. That's really important next to the parking zone, just to reinforce. You need that. It's not a usable part of the sidewalk. It's where, you know... It's a really important part of the sidewalk, but it's not usable. So at the moment you have eight feet effective. And let me be clear, north central, you've got multiple widths, just to be fair, because you've done some expansion in some places and not in others. And you have four lanes of traffic, basically. If you take that down to two lanes of traffic, which is in great retail areas, two lanes of traffic for short blocks like you have is more than adequate. With parking either side, parking's very essential. So we're not changing the parking. So you've got the traffic lanes, you've got the parking lanes, there and there, you got an amenity zone, you got amenity zone. So ultimately you get in the range of 16 feet and that can be designed in multiple ways. You can allow the store to spill out and occupy something and you walk here or you can do it in another way. This type of design would require sensitivity to how you service the buildings where you service the buildings. It requires sensitivity to Uber lift and drop off zones and valet service and things like that. But again, this would be accommodated in terms of within the parking zones and designated management times to be able to handle this. All pretty straightforward in other places. So you can move where and how you occupy it. And it depends a little bit on the type of retail. As an example, if you had a type of retail where this is a restaurant, and then right next door to the restaurant is an eyeglass store, as an example. You wouldn't want the restaurant having their outdoor dining next to it. You'd want the walk zone here so everyone can get access to the facade and the entrances, and you'd put the outdoor dining over here. If you had five restaurants all in a row, you could have done the previous model because no one would have to get there. So you can have quite a lot of flexibility in how you lay all this out. Does that help?

Yeah, it did. Thank you for reviewing that. I have a couple

questions. So I want to understand if in some of your work here, you've singled out North Central, which I think is great. And so I'm wondering if in the end here, does this mean that our guidelines as they are written finally, will have a special section for North Central identifying specifically what is desired there in that entertainment street with the retail articulation and all the other things that you've mentioned about Central.

I pulled it out as an example. In previous presentations, we've given how this would be translated into And how you could do something similarly on Maryland on that side. So it's a broader question, Mayor, on whether you want the guidelines to incorporate street design. We've done equivalent for all others. I'm showing this as an example, but it would be a policy decision from the city on whether in guidelines that you give the developer, you indicate your design intent for the ultimate design of the street. The reason I put that in as an example is because if a developer understands what you're doing in the public right-of-way and the design there, they will orientate their retail and the type of tenants they're after and therefore the design of the retail space within the building very differently. So this is a broad policy question, how you would like to go with this. But ultimately, great retail has great retail streets. What you have there today all the way around is not great retail streets. If you want to move towards great retail and entertainment streets, you'd need to do some adjusting and that's what we're saying. I think it's important to indicate to the developer if you have priorities on some streets or how that should work.

Okay. Well, I think what I was really getting at is not so much the width of the sidewalks and the actual design of the street, but the type of architecture and massing and setbacks and all that you've put in other parts of this presentation. In a couple of instances, you singled out North Central. And I'm asking you if in our final guidelines, we can do that or is that what you're kind of moving toward is giving specifics about a particular street?

Uh, maybe I misrepresented the only specific I've given relative to central is sidewalk design. All the others would apply equally to, to all other parts of the district.

Okay. Maybe I misunderstood some of the, some of these pages. Okay. Um, the other question I have is, is just that I'm, you know, I sent you some information about solar planes and sunlight. And I really, that information really is pretty more, it's more relevant to taller buildings, taller than six stories or even 10 stories. So, but that being said, you recommend a sunlight study. Is that different from a shadow study? No,

it's exactly the same. Okay.

All right.

Just the other way around. Okay.

Okay, those are my two. I have other things, but I'll send them

to you. Okay, I'll come back to the sun and solar study because under environmental design, there's a question back to you all on how specific do you want to get? And I'll touch back on that at that point. Other questions or thoughts at this stage?

John, I've got a question for you. If you have a developer that's got some portion of a block and in discussing the design and the sidewalk, and we suggest to them that we want a certain design in the sidewalk and the amenities, PB, Harmon Zuckerman, It if it then results in half of the block having a sidewalk in one with and the other half having a different width. How does that are we are we better off or worse off having that break like that. PB,

David Ensign — He, Him, I think when you indicate to the developer in that case specific case that you're wanting design A in this call it the expanded walkway. You have to make that indication on the understanding that the other half will at some point in time become exactly like that. It's a phasing issue, not a final design. Your sidewalk design must go from one end of the block to the other end of the block as a concept.

What if the other end of the block has been more recently developed under the old method? And so we don't really expect that to happen for 25, 30 years.

Well, then my sense is you have to obviously go with what you've already decided. So

I guess the question is, are we better off having a consistent block or having half of the block be ideal and the other half be not

ideal? That's a little bit of a tough question, and I'm going to want to think about that. Okay. But in principle, it depends how you do it. In other words, if it looks purposeful, sidewalks, even in some blocks, vary. depending upon what uses you're having on the sidewalks. So let me think through that a little bit, and I know you pointed to a very particular case here, but the principle, the top ranked hierarchy of design, you try and get your sidewalks one end of the block to the other, unless there is a really solid reason why And I've seen this in some cases where, for instance, they

move

the parking for half the block and that becomes a really important outdoor dining area. And then half the block has parking. So sidewalks have gone in and out. It needs to be purposefully done. So it's really a matter of how you do it in the ideal world, you know, You go block one end of the block to the other. You really should conceive of it, even if it wanders in and out.

Good.

Thank you.

John, if I can add to that on the sidewalk questions. Yes. There's actually a chat box question that there are certain areas where we're putting protected bike lanes in the downtown area. And you talked about the sidewalks being able to accommodate all modes of transportation, including biking, walking, everything else. How do you see that accommodating the different modes of transportation with the bikes, with walkers and everything else? Just having them wide enough for both things to be happening or what do you see?

Well, are you asking sort of throughout the entire district? Because clearly Maryland is very, very different street to say a central or

Beamanston. With the wider walks, what do you?

In that case, I would be advocating for shared bike lanes with the travel lanes. Because again, what you're trying to do in retail areas is you've got three mile an hour walking, you've got a little bit higher on biking, but you want your vehicle speeds, quite frankly, to be no more than 20 in the ideal world. Because people in retail areas, people basically also shop from their their car. You go slow enough through the retail area. Now on Maryland, that would be completely different. So it varies street by street.

Yeah, and that makes total sense because you'd want the bikers to be going slow. I understand that. Another question I had, kind of picking up on Michelle's because I thought you were talking primarily on Central as well, is if the whole area is the same design with the retail in the bottom and things you've described, yet Central's the only one that has that wider walk with a three mile per hour movement. The sidewalks support other streets with retail on that first level.

No, that's a good question. And maybe I was in error because I just highlighted Central, but in previous presentations, we've done a similar... projection for each of the other streets. So in Bemisden, we would also be suggesting that you have an opportunity to widen some of the sidewalks. So each one will be slightly adjusted to try and get to that sidewalk. And again, I'm going to say relative to topography. because you got a little bit more complication on Forsyth because of the topography in terms of actually having retail outdoors. So there is subtle differences between each of the streets depending on topography where we can foster that outdoor dining area.

Very helpful, thanks. John, I have a question. It's Ira Berkowitz. Hi. So I don't notice anything in your proposals for the possibility of closing streets permanently. That is happening in a lot of cities. I see it. I'm in Denver now, and in Denver they've closed about 14 different streets during this time period. Of course, COVID has played a role in order for them to have more outdoor dining. But it's been successful, very successful. And it's being considered as more permanently, even after COVID goes away. We have some streets, I think that, you know, we're talking about sidewalks and making them wide enough for this, that and the other thing. You know, and I'm wondering, is it something you've not considered? Is it something you don't think we should consider? Or is it something that we could incorporate and should incorporate?

I had raised this earlier in some of the advisory meetings and there was quite a big pushback for permanent closure. And so one of the things that I was suggesting is in this, there's a great opportunity to be able to do this on a temporary incremental basis. So the idea of the shared streets to do that. And it's so I think at this point, the way I read the group, and maybe I got it wrong, but they read the group, they weren't prepared to have full closure of any street block. But they were open to the opportunity to close certain blocks at certain times. So that's why I put in this whole idea of the temporary uses. How that would sorry,

go ahead. No, no, I appreciate that. I was one and I and And I understand that there was some discussion, but I guess I'm looking to you as the consultant. And I know that you, of course, want to reflect the opinion of the people who you've talked to. But what about you as a consultant? Would that be something that you would recommend to the city, that there would be a street, perhaps even North Central Avenue, that would actually be closed on a permanent basis? that would enhance and perhaps facilitate more or better vibrancy to the city?

My general perspective on that is I preferred shared streets that allow them to be managed as opposed to full and final closure. I'm a great proponent of the shared street as opposed to a fully closed street. So you get the best of both worlds whenever you need, however you need to manage them. And I'm saying that from a longer term perspective of We're not 100% sure of what type of retail you're going to be getting on these streets. And that's why I indicated very early on perhaps a more focused retail study would be useful here. At the moment, the type of retail you have is sort of fast casual type retail and take out, which relies on parking spaces immediately outside. If you went to permanent closure, all that retail would disappear and it would have to be replaced with something else. So again, this is why I tend to border on the idea of the shared streets. and that they can be managed so they can be closed as need be and opened as need be. And it becomes part and parcel of managing that retail area.

Okay, thank you. Thank you very much.

Other thoughts? I want to be sensitive. We don't run over time. Yeah, so maybe... What I'll do is just move through these last few because there's some important concepts here. Moving on to the building elements and materials, landscape design guidance, public art, placemaking, environmental design. So as we go through these, I have more questions than answers for you at this stage. I need to get some direction on how much you want us to go into particular components here. But let's start with the building elements and materials because this becomes important relative to the next scale of design of them. So building elements, we now down at very detailed elements, the ground floor windows and doors, how much transparency they have, the type of glass that you're beginning to use becomes very important. So in this particular area, you really want a very transparent view in that bottom right hand corner is exactly the type of transparency we're trying to achieve. That when you're walking, when you're biking, when you're in a car, you can look into the store and you understand it. This is very important from the understanding of retail. And then the idea of balconies, the upper levels, the top right hand side as an idea Maximum 40% of the frontage facades can have balconies. Remember, they hang over the right way, but they become very, very appealing because in the first five floors of the building, if you're on the opposite side, your eye can actually see people and see elements. You see the life on the facade of those buildings. So balconies and outdoor spaces within the first five floors in the width of the streets you have are actually quite important for contributing to that. And then finally, sort of in the building, the canopies and awnings and shelves becoming right, not to be monolithic, to have that variation. And the idea of building signage in a retail area Your current signage is the way it's embedded in there is quite frankly, not so great. It's very much a downtown type of signage. Signage can contribute to the ambience of these districts. So we are suggesting that you might consider projecting signs and you might consider illuminated signage as part of this. Obviously, the scale and how it's done is very, very important. But they do contribute to that sense of vibrancy of the area. And then, of course- Hey, John? Yes?

John, it's Michelle. I have a quick question on the previous slide where you talked about canopies and so on. The last sentence there says multiple awnings, blah, blah, blah should be coordinated and matching. Doesn't that just mean that all the awnings will look alike? And isn't that what you said earlier is not a good

idea? It should be coordinated, not matching. Sorry, I shouldn't have mentioned.

Okay. It

should be coordinated but not matching.

Okay. Thank you.

Good catch. And then obviously building equipment, Loading docks, trash collection, screens and screening is all vitally important. And it's pretty standard stuff that you all know shouldn't be within the public right as well. And then of course, night lighting is very, very important. And to the extent, you should really have this as a component of your architectural review because it's Lighting is everything. And again, this entertainment district is going to operate at night. So vitally, vitally important. And here you can see on the bottom right-hand side how important interior lighting of the facade is because you can actually see the lights spill over and that sense of safety. So you can see this light coming onto there. It is really, really an important safety thing consideration as well for walking because lighting above here can only do so much. And typically in summer with the trees, you don't get much spillover from the downlighting. So your actual large amount of your ground floor lighting comes from your storefront and then clearly just the ambience that is created at night. is everything for your building. Building materials, always quite controversial. So I'm going to just sort of make sure you have a sense of what we're suggesting here. So we're always looking for high quality materials. We're all looking that they weather well, low failure rate, less maintenance, et cetera. And so in the guidelines, we're suggesting a limited number of facade material. So in the examples you see, they're not an enormous range of materials, they're limited now and they designed at a smaller scale, a high level of detailing. Material changes should occur at the inside corners. So as you look at the bottom left-hand side here, the glass screens, the change occurs in the corners of buildings not in the front plane. So again, we try to suggest that with the material you get step back so there's relief to the different materials. And this is a major component of the materials. We are suggesting there are two classifications of materials, major and minor. The major materials shall make up 80% of each facade with 60% of each facade being a single material. So again, what we are looking for is on those enormously long facades, like I showed you on that one, you don't only have to break up the facade, you have to change the materials of it and move them in. So there's some type of authenticity about using the material. The major materials allow stone, brick, wood, and architectural metal panels. prohibited. You can see those. They're basically varieties of stucco. And then there's a limited use of major materials, economic brick, fiber cement board, cement-based stucco, concrete masonry. The minor materials are limited to trim details and other areas that combined are less than 25% of the total surface. And there's an allowed minor materials here and there's a list of these. I want to point out, we have put the glass curtain walls here as a minor material. What that means is you can't have full glass buildings in this district, right? And so if I just jump back to give the illustration of the materials I'm going to run back to that diagram that I was drawing on just to indicate the materials. This would be an example of it. So here you have your major materials and you have your minor material, your glass corner in that case, to give you an example of that. But this, the way we've written this suggests that you cannot come in And as an example, if this was fully glass, that would not be permitted under this material designation. So it's something we want you to debate internally and see if you're comfortable with it. But typically full glass buildings, particularly as they scale up become really difficult in retail environments and on retail streets.

So EFIS isn't going to be, it looks like it's prohibited both major and minor.

No, you allowed minors glass curtain, sorry.

For the EFIS?

Allowed minor.

No, no, no, not, I'm talking about the stucco, the synthetic stucco. Prohibited. In both, right? That's prohibited in

both.

That's great because that stuff looks terrible over time.

And there's really some huge challenges. Landscape guidelines. Here we're not doing the street guidelines so we call this green cover and the idea of the green in welded into this area obviously creates a great sense of human comfort, integration of nature, deals with the heat island. This example of what we would call green cover is on, you can see on the right-hand sides. That's micro-greening as an idea. And of course, just to reflect back, that under the development standards, you can build a courtyard building. So there still can be courtyards as well. So that's covered under this. But the idea that this area just really has a lot of opportunity for micro-greening. And then, of course, the idea of vegetated roofs are very important. And we give the three standard levels of vegetated roof for you to understand. Because on the lower buildings that you have here, you're gonna be looking down. So your roof scape is increasingly becoming prominent from all your offices and everything else around. So that becomes an important opportunity for you. And then public art and placemaking, this is more of a question for you than a solution. Given the nature of the entertainment district and the retail, we can see tremendous opportunity to use public art for placemaking and really have the opportunity for temporary events and things like that here. And my question is, should this be covered in these regulations or are they covered somewhere else? And I know you have a public art advisory committee And I just wonder if they're involved in the project review. So this is more of a question back to you, whether this should be incorporated in these guidelines or not. But you can see the opportunity just from the images of what you could be doing. And given that you have an art fair here, I mean, there's just so much synergy that one can begin to think of the street design and the public realm to do that. I looked at all your policies for acquiring and promoting public art and wondered how we could integrate that into this. And then this notion of, in fact, the creative placemaking component and pop-up stores, all the things that cities are fully investigating. Are there particular places in this district that this makes sense to be doing? Kind of questions back to you, but opening the opportunity that public art and creative pacemaking could be an important identifier. And then onto the environmental standards. Again, this is more of a question to you, whether in these guidelines we should be making very particular water energy, heat island, solar access, dark skies, and bird safe design components in this or are these taken care of in your other code review policy of that? But you can kind of see the range of things on the left hand side that one would normally write into a bigger code update in terms of environmental design. And I noticed, you know, your sustainability advisory committee has the green sheets that they offer to developers wondering how best to or not incorporate them into these guidelines. So thoughts and questions on this section?

To the question about art being incorporated, one of the biggest problems we run into is when the developer's coming back to us and basically saying, what art do you want? Tell us what you want, and we'll put it there. And I think part of that is they're trying to solve the problem at the end instead of having much guidance at the beginning. So personally, I would love to see more information and ways to inform them about public art and environmental because both of those things, if they do decide to go for a PUD, are points, opportunities for them to get points on the PUD. So I completely vote for that.

hopefully these guidelines would preclude them looking for a PUD.

True. That's right. I guess they would.

I think that's our goal. I don't think it'll be, it would be nice if we achieve it.

We want them to incorporate ARC into their

plan. I think you're absolutely right, though, which should be considered up front.

I agree with that. And Rich, you've got a good point. So maybe at some point here i'm not sure when we should go back and look i know we're working on a architectural lighting ordinances which i think will be considering environmental impact but um some of these other things um i think you know it would be a good idea if we could david go back and review where we are where we stand with some of those other topics and see if we want to enhance what we've got

Yeah, I almost think that both of those topics, especially given the Board of Aldermen's conversation last night on murals, which led to kind of a larger discussion on public art. I think both art and environmental design are probably larger topics than just this particular study. I think we need to figure out how they fit overall just into our zoning regulations generally. So I don't know that it's really important that they're specifically listed in here But I do think it's important that we have that broader discussion. That would be my opinion on everything at this point.

So does a mural count as articulation?

If it

sticks out. John, you've referenced the Forsyth point. project that we've already approved a few times, which is in this district. Could you briefly tell us how that might have been different had these design guidelines been in place?

That's a really hard question because I'm not 100% familiar with the detailed design of that. So I mean, I think The big picture, let me just do the big picture based upon my limited knowledge. It's essentially a podium building with two towers. So it has a base and a tower. I think you would have, from these guidelines, these guidelines would have suggested to you, you need to have a thorough discussion and review should those towers be equal One tower was facing the park, one tower is facing across the road, historic building and smaller corners. Do they need to be equal? Should they be differentiated? Would be one component these guidelines would force you into. The second component would be at the ground floor level, really understanding the retail environment you're creating in there These would have required there to be small-scale retailing all the way around on the three sides of the building, obviously not on the alley. So that would have been a component. The base design is essentially, maybe I'll find that image, the base design is essentially one block. So the debates you would have had sorry, I'm just trying to find, the debates you would have had. So one is essentially, and again, I might be mistaken, two equal tiles. You would have spent an enormous amount of time looking at the ground floor level. And the base essentially is non-articulated. It's just one extrusion. You would have wanted to have a discussion like, And again, I'm just going on this one image. It appears that this is all one material. So under these guidelines, they would have had to begin to kind of articulate that base in a more textured way.

Thank you. I appreciate that. I know it was kind of putting you on the spot, but since you kept referring back to it, I thought you wouldn't mind.

This is not, I'm not making a valid judgment. the building let me be clear i'm saying and and the methodology that you've just employed which is how do these guidelines change what has been put in place is a very thoughtful and very astute way of checking whether you want these guidelines or not or how you want them to adjust quite often we take these guidelines and with city administrations would look through previous proposal review and say, how would these guidelines change that design? Do we think it changes it for the better? And that's one way you can think through the guidelines.

Yeah, that's why I kind of asked that question because I know- what's there, but I don't know what could have been there. They did give us very deep sidewalks, but it is kind of a monolith, which I don't

particularly. John, one of the things that we have seen from the developers that have made presentations and offered retail on the first floor is that they prefer to have bigger spaces as opposed to the small ones that you've suggested we want. Is a bigger space that's broken up somehow? Can you articulate a big space or is the only way to do it to break it into smaller spaces? Because the developers, my impression is they don't want to do that. They want bigger spaces.

Unless you have a retail consultant on the development team, many developers, and I'm not referring to any project in your city at the moment, but many developers that we have to review projects for, are, for instance, office developers or developers of residential, the pro forma of the development. The retail is sort of a throwaway, so to speak. And so what I was trying to make as a point is that if you're wanting this retail, and I took this retail from your current ordinances, so I'm not making it up, I'm not suggesting that this is what you state in your current ordinances and in the entertainment district. So if the developer is not a retail developer or doesn't have a retail developer with them, the easiest thing to do is large scale retail spaces, generic that they can be subdivided. And that's why I saying that it's really important to understand What type of retail, when you think of the entertainment district, what type of uses are there? Because they come with very, very particular things. A restaurant versus a mom and pop store is two very, very different things. And that's what you have to sort out. There are ways you can do retailing, have large spaces. And that was in the regulations, I called it an L retail space. where you have smaller spaces in front and a deeper retail space, that's a pretty straightforward and standard way to go. One big retail store with one entry to that store is essentially a deal killer on a retail street. Now, if you had a very big restaurant with one door the windows open and there was outdoor dining. That would be very different, right? So you can have slightly larger restaurant spaces and it works extremely well. But big single retail stores on a type of commercial street that you are trying to make is that contrast. to each other.

Thank you.

We'll give you back a second for the environmental and public art conversation. I agree that full review is probably appropriate, but is there anything particular for this district that lends itself to handling either the environmental or the public art with this work?

Well, I do think the idea of solar access is important in this just because you're trying to make this heavily retail. So that sensitivity and that's why I wrote that you have the studies done as part and parcel of the review. I think that's important. Not that any of this is unimportant, but in particular the solar access is important. I think that the idea that you have an opportunity, you've made a very specific district called an entertainment district. It is the centerpiece of where you hold one of the most important art shows. It's a really important thing. I think you'd be able to think that this area could really be a focus for public art in here as part and parcel of that retail environment, I think would be a very nice synergy. It's not essential, but it could be a nice synergy.

I couldn't agree more. I think that when you find really good retail pedestrian entertainment spaces, they almost always include some kind of public garden, even if it's just how are the benches? Are they interesting benches? I personally think that it's really important for us to look at this as well as the architecture or this design. The environmental, after looking more at that, I think we are covering that a lot on our lighting design work that we're doing, but I would advocate that we really do need to consider placemaking.

I just want to underscore that because I think one thing I've said when we talked originally and also when we've talked with some developers that are considering projects now, I think that the idea is if you took Central Avenue and the surrounding areas, but I'm focusing the heart of this on Central in my mind. If you wanted to make a place, what would you do? and how would you build it? And what kind of ambience would you create? And how would you make it a place where people really want to be? And so that, I think this is really important. I don't know how you weave it into what you've already crafted, but I would say it's an important aspect for this district.

Would you consider Maryland Park as part of the placemaking area for this district, Michelle?

Well, I'm looking at the map now.

It's across the street from it. It's not within the entertainment

district. Yeah, right, right, right. Well, it's not in the entertainment district, but it is within kind of the bounds of what, you know, these consultants looked at. And I, you know, is it part of the place? The place that I'm really focused on is Central Avenue and sort of this sort of naturally sort of enclosed area where we could have events and where people would be. Does Maryland Park contribute to the overall amenities and ambiance of the whole area? Absolutely, I think it will. And especially if there is residential developed there across the street. So I wouldn't rule it out but it's not the core of what I was thinking. Does that help?

That helps, I'm gonna hold you to that in March.

Could I ask people's thought on the full glass building or the not full glass building?

What do you mean?

Well, you know, I talked about the materials in terms of a glass curtain wall. Primary materials. Let's just say if you had a full block building that's fully glass, yeah.

John, are you, so would you actually say that Centene, I mean, is a full glass building?

Yes, yeah.

I mean, I don't, I appreciate that you're trying, I mean, I think having a full glass building, I mean, that the Centene buildings are pretty. I mean, love looking at them and seeing the sky reflected in the glass. I think that's, depending on if it's a blue sky or a cloudy sky. I mean, I look at them obviously all day long because I'm right next to downtown, but I do appreciate that by not having an all glass, there is just, it's more interesting, I suppose. But I guess I've never thought of an all glass building as necessarily a bad thing before you said it today.

I'm kind of with Bridget. I think that the buildings are pretty, but they're pretty when I'm driving into town. They're not pretty when I'm at the pedestrian level. So I'm not sure how, I mean, I don't have a problem from them from a distance, but how would we make the experience at the pedestrian level what we want? I mean, it's hard to articulate a full-class building. Maybe different colored glasses, I don't know. I think for this area that we're talking about, I would never say this for the whole downtown area, but I don't have a problem for this district that we're talking. Yes.

And Joanne, just let me reinforce that. This was put in just purely for this district. If you're, and that's what I was trying to say at the beginning, I've tried to tailor these just for this district. You wouldn't have this level of specificity or some of these regulations if you were doing the full downtown code, right? It would be very different. So I was really trying to kind of react to how you could put a new building in here with all the other buildings that are around and still have that ambience you've all been talking about. And, you know, that's why I went in the direction I went. And that's why I'm pulling it out so that we can have a thorough discussion on it.

I just don't know how you get past the sterility, you know, just the

sterile

environment of a glass building. Although I don't mind, I mean, from a distance, I think they look so

cool. Yeah, and John, to your point, but I think, you know, it seems to me when I think about the glass building that it sort of is contrary to almost everything you've said today. Mm-hmm. No. Why? You know, there's no texture. And in this case, it's just a rectangular building with just going straight up and down. Everything is consistently throughout. It's all the same throughout. And I thought we were trying to get away from that. And I think we should get away from that, and I think when I look at the Centene buildings, both of them, as I drive down Hanley, I don't see them as much as Bridget does, but to me, after doing it two or three times, it's like, okay, not interesting anymore, you know?

Well, how I've written the guidelines, Ira, you cannot do that in this district. Thank

you.

Yeah, and I think that's appropriate for this district.

I would agree it's appropriate, and I agree with Ira as well. There is some beauty to the Centene buildings, but I would not want to see our skyline solely composed of the Centene glass buildings. And I think differentiating this area will help us keep and preserve and enhance an attractive skyline for Clayton.

This is Steve again. Some of the glass buildings, and I really should not be in this district we're talking about, but some of them can be detailed so that there is some minor texturing. If you get close to the centene buildings, You can see the frit on the glass, both at the lower and the upper ends of each pane. I'm not saying that that works very well because we see those buildings more from a distance than from close up. But also, I think one of the main things about a glass building is how it meets the ground level. And if it comes straight down, it's just another extruded monstrosity. But if there's more thought given to differentiating and having a variety of potential materials and setbacks and insets, it could work. But again, I don't think it really belongs in this area that we're talking about.

And just pile on, I'll pile on with the comment that, you know, in the very beginning, you mentioned that this district has sort of a historic heart to it. And I do agree with that. And that is something I think that is worth honoring and putting all glass or even 75% glass would probably be in stark contrast to that and really change the character of the area. So I'm agreeing with you on what you recommended.

Right on, Michelle.

John, this is Helen. I would agree too. I love glass buildings, but I think what you're proposing is a good transition to the residential around it especially the small one and two family buildings that surround this northern section of the district.

Well, I want to be sensitive to all your time. I think we were supposed to finish at three. I don't know if David's still on the call.

I think we're pretty wrapped up. Can you give us the so we can see everybody again screen?

Yep. Did you have any other specific questions you wanted? I saw the list at the bottom, John.

I'll send it all out until you'll have those questions there. You've answered most of them in principle. So thank you.

Thank you. I think it was really well put together. I really appreciate it. And I know everyone does. So I wrote down a number of things I want to kind of dig into. And I'm wondering, can you send this presentation to us soon? Because while it's fresh in our little minds, so we can follow up with comments. Yeah.

We'll certainly do that. And comments are really great. And please push back because that helps us to understand how firm you want to be on certain topics. things because every city has their own tolerance for the level of design guidelines, right? We've got, we sort of slightly on the stronger side than average here, you know, very particular, this length here, this height here, things like that. So please look at this in detail and we're happy to do any further research that you need to get these to where you're comfortable with it.

Thank you. I don't think you'll have any trouble receiving comments. There's no shy people on this board.

No. So, okay guys. Um, thank you. And we'll, we'll plan to, we're going to reconvene. Are we going to reconvened then? You said on November 19th or something. Is that what you said? No, you wanted comments by a week from Friday.

Correct. That's that's comments by November the 19th. Um, H3 will take those comments. We'll review those and then figure out where to go with those final draft regulations. The other component that I need to have some discussion about with Susan Istenes and John and Tim is the public input component. You know, typically with something like this, you would have an open house. Of course, the pandemic has changed things. So there are a variety of options. But we do at some point need to figure out how to have some kind of public commentary on this outside of just the public hearings that would be held at the time the regulations are adopted. I think we probably need to seek some of that feedback before then. And I certainly know that we have some residents north of Maryland and Old Town and some other areas that are very interested in what's going on and kind of looking for that opportunity to participate. So I'll talk to John and Tim and Susan about that. We'll kind of formulate a plan here over the next week or so about how we're going to engage the community. But in the meantime, please submit those comments. And then once we have that community input, we have the draft regulations finalized, then of course this would go through the plan commission and then ultimately to the Board of Aldermen for adoption. So that's the plan at this point.

Okay, that sounds good. I would urge us to move with haste because things are happening all the time. So

yes,

I know that we won't be getting your comments to you until a week from Friday. If it helps, I'm prepared to give them to you sooner. but then as a follow-up, I just hope we can kind of keep moving here instead of waiting. You were

prepared before we had the meeting.

That's right. No, no, I wasn't. I wasn't. All right. So sorry to be such a, to be pushing so hard, but.

Oh, you know what? It's so unusual of you, Michelle, it's taken a while.

Hey, Ira, you're saying I would take that comment as a bad thing. Not a bad thing to push to get things done. I

think it's good, Michelle. Go for

it. I'm saying it is good, but I think there are times when you use discretion on when we push and when we don't. I think you use good judgment. That's how I would put it.

Sorry, that was a joke at your expense. I'm sorry, Michelle. That's all right. I'll get you

back. All right. All right, guys. Thank you, everyone. And look forward to the next round. Thanks a

lot. Thanks, Tim. Bye.