MacArthur Park Plan Wins AIA Honor Award

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MacArthur Park District Master Plan. Image courtesy of University of Arkansas Community Design Center.

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The Connections: MacArthur Park District Master Plan continues to win recognition, this time with a prestigious award from The American Institute of Architects. It recently won a 2010 Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design from the AIA. This makes the seventh award garnered by the project.

The University of Arkansas Community Design Center, working with architect William Conway of Conway and Schulte Architects in Minneapolis and landscape architect Tom Oslund of Oslund and Associates, also in Minneapolis, designed the MacArthur Park District Master Plan. Conway and Oslund are both former visiting professors at the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the university. This is the sixth AIA national award won by the Community Design Center, an outreach program of the Fay Jones School of Architecture.

“We are pleased to have been part of the ongoing efforts by local civic groups and the city to revitalize Arkansas’ finest urban park. It’s my hope that the national recognition will stimulate further investment into this undervalued but highly livable downtown district by the local development market,” said Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center.

MacArthur Park, the oldest park in Little Rock, was cut off from its surrounding neighborhoods in the 1960s, with the construction of interstate highways 30 and 630. In 2008, the city of Little Rock requested proposals to redesign and revitalize the 40-acre park.

The AIA jury said this about the plan: “Connecting a historically residential area of Little Rock in a way that also extends the park beyond its highway-induced isolation, this is an excellent endeavor to mitigate the effects of other-scaled urban infrastructures and use connective landscape amenities to enhance the quality of the urban experience and ‘eyes on-the-street’ security. Great connections back into the city recognize that the edges of the park provide an excellent transition from the harder highway zones to the softer human center of the park. This set of solutions is not only an excellent specific case; it is also a transferable approach to urban reconstruction. Between the public art and an iconic bridge, there is a variety of public space that is very well done. With a variety of different scales working from the under-used edge to the larger center, this is an Olmsted landscape idea nicely achieved.” Frederick Law Olmsted, considered the founder of American landscape architecture, worked on projects including Central Park in New York City and the U.S. Capitol grounds in Washington, D.C.

The MacArthur Park plan was one of seven to win an honor award in the Regional and Urban Design category. That category’s jury included John F. Torti, FAIA, (chairman), Torti Gallas and Partners Inc., Silver Spring, Maryland; Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, Lance Jay Brown Architecture and Urban Design, New York City; Brenda Scheer, AIA, University of Utah College of Architecture and Planning, Salt Lake City; Edward K. Uhlir, FAIA, Uhlir Consulting LLC, Chicago; and Debby Wieneke, Habitat for Humanity of Benton County Inc., Bentonville, Ark.

According to the AIA Web site, this honor awards program recognizes achievements for a broad range of architectural activity to elevate the general quality of architecture practice, establish a standard of excellence against which all architects can measure performance, and inform the public of the breadth and value of architecture practice.

Selected from more than 700 submissions, the winning 28 projects in the categories of architecture, interior architecture, and regional and urban design will be exhibited at the annual AIA convention in Miami in June. They will also be featured in Architectural Record, the profession’s national magazine.

The MacArthur Park plan has also won the following honors:

• Medal from the Association of Licensed Architects
• 2009 Citation Award from the Arkansas chapter of The American Institute of Architects
• 2009 Professional Design Award from the Society of American Registered Architects
• 2009 Achievement in Urban Design Award from the Arkansas chapter of the American Planning Association
• 2009 Urban Design Award from the Boston Society of Architects and New York chapter of the AIA
• 2009 Merit Award from the Minnesota chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects.