Chattanooga's riverfront, showing Ross's Landing Plaza. 
Student ideas showed the way to revitalizing Miller Plaza.
Chattanooga's riverfront, showing Ross's Landing Plaza.
UTK architecture students and Professor Stroud Watson are changing the face of downtown Chattanooga and its riverfront.
The city has been a "lab" for the College of Architecture and Planning since 1980, when the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects requested that UTK students focus their design work in Chattanooga. Watson, fresh from nearly a decade of planning and developing the new town of Milton Keynes, England, arrived in 1981. He's been working ever since to help preserve Chattanooga's architectural past and shape its architectural future.
The Miller Park District, now a thriving center city landmark, looked like "a war zone" in 1981, Watson says.
"Through student work, we showed a variety of ways to develop the district. The plans got the attention of city leaders, we got some money from the Lyndhurst Foundation to hire professionals (the prestigious Boston firm of Koetter, Kim and Associates), and we got Miller Plaza built," Watson says.
The project won an Urban Design Award and the coveted AIA Honor Award.
"We did the same thing with the riverfront. We must have had 25 or 30 student projects showing what could be done there, including the aquarium."
The UT "lab" has evolved into the Riverfront/Downtown Planning and Design Center, now funded and jointly staffed by the Chattanooga-Hamilton County Regional Planning Commission, RiverValley Partners, the Lyndhurst Foundation, and UT Knoxville. The Center provides coordination, design guidance, and standards for downtown and riverfront development to public and private developers.
A primary focus, Watson says, is "reinhabiting the city."
"We've spent the last few years looking at new types of buildings that will encourage the rehabitation of the city. We're looking at buildings that have housing, shops, maybe parking.
"The existing city is an enormous resource. Most developers think their opportunities are in open green fields. In the city, you have existing facilitiesÑwater, other utilities, and buildings that are part of the continuity, the fabric of the place."
In addition to his commitment to the Planning and Design Center, Watson serves on the board of Cornerstones, an historic preservation group that seeks to save important city buildings.
"The basic premise is to find methods to maintain the historic fabric of the city until it can be reinhabited. Buildings were coming down because the time was not right for redevelopment."
Students are now exploring the development of Second Street, (historically the First Street of downtown) "the spine of the downtown/waterfront area," Watson says. The plans they make may not be implemented for decades, but vision is essential to progress.
"I remember people in the 1980s looking at our plans for the riverfront and downtown and saying, Ôthis is outrageous, this will never work in Chattanooga,'" Watson recalls. "We have to begin to envision what real opportunities there are, and they will come."
TRJones (trjones@utk.edu)