1986-1994: Columbus (IN) Front Door Corridor
One of SKA's first major commissions was to scope out the connection to the world from the two-mile distant Interstate 65 to the City of Columbus, Indiana. One of our design heroes, landscape architect Dan Kiley, had developed an earlier planting of willows that quickly and effectively established the visual sense of an entryway corridor across the Driftwood and East Fork White Rivers’ flood plain. But the formally arranged planting ultimately declined. SKA prepared a replacement plan, but one that looked well beyond landscape restoration to consider a comprehensive multimodal corridor and reimagined transportation infrastructure to establish a sense of arrival and place.
SKA was retained through most of what ultimately became a multi-year multidisciplinary evolving team process. It resulted in a nationally recognized entryway corridor, and a new entry configuration that has shaped subsequent downtown development. The plan’s included trail winds through the floodplain and passes uninterrupted through the Interstate 65 ramp area and its iconic red cable-stayed bridge designed by Jean Muller. The strategy would leverage typical roadway investment cycles of rehabilitation and reconstruction to establish major improvements to the roadway to realize its multimodal potential and to establish a sense of arrival and place.Implementation funding was secured by a special Federal Demonstration Project.
Publication: The Leveraging of Infrastructure Renewal to Create an Interstate Front Door was presented by Meg Storrow and John Kinsella at the 1997 American Society of Landscape Architects Annual Meeting in Atlanta Georgia, and was published under the category of Landscape Architecture in the Civic Realm in the Proceedings of that annual national conference of landscape architects.
PROJECT SUMMARY
Columbus Front Door
Role: urban design and planning for bicycle/pedestrian connections
SKA tenure through three contracts: 1986-1994
Client: City of Columbus
A single-point intersection and the need for uninterrupted pedestrian connectivity led to the need for the long-span cable stay bridge. It has become an iconic gateway to the City of Columbus. SKA also sited a second bridge crossing the Driftwood River to downtown that aligned with a view of the Courthouse. The signature red color was selected to extend city branding and unite with other public structures in Mill Race Park.
Award: Excellence in Highway Design Category 3a - Major Highway, Federal Highway Administration
2004-2014: French Lick/West Baden Springs and SR 56 Corridor connectivity
storrow|kinsella was planning and context sensitive design lead in association with Hannum Wagle & Cline engineers for this project that began in support of the two towns’ interface with INDOT regarding a proposed state highway reconstruction project. Proposed improvements to SR 56 were intended to accommodate traffic generated by a new “riverboat” gaming destination that was being developed in conjunction with restoration of two historic resort hotels that flourished in the 1920-30’s but that had fallen into disrepair. Conventional highway design was felt to compromise the historic resort character that the area was attempting to restore through anticipated distribution of gaming revenue taxes.
The corridor study resulted in the road being designed and constructed according to complete streets principles with reduced travel lanes, wide separated sidewalks and segments of traffic-calming medians. The plan successfully demonstrated the economies, roadway capacity sufficiency and traffic calming benefit of rehabilitating the existing concrete arch bridge as a two travel-lane plus separated shared bicycle-pedestrian path, rather than constructing a new, and costlier, four-lane bridge at the entry to West Baden Springs that would have had no pedestrian component. storrow|kinsella prepared preliminary designs to guide INDOT's engineering consultants for the bridge, roadway geometrics, and for the retaining walls along the corridor. While those designs were incorporated based on their technically sound best practices for roadway design, the intended collateral benefit of corridor aesthetics, identity and traffic calming was their major achievement. Ironically, our attempt to maintain the two-lane configuration through two major intersections by the use of urban roundabouts was supported by INDOT transportation planners but opposed by historic preservation advocates based on those devices not having historic "provenance". Our argument that four to five-lane signalized intersections did not respect historic street scale was unsuccessful.
The corridor plan also recommended that both towns undertake additional initiatives concurrent with the road reconstruction to strengthen their then-disconnected relationship to the resort area, and to create the sense of the Springs Valley being one connected place, with the following results: