The City of Richardson is in process of getting public input that will shape the design of a new City Hall. I'm here to report on lessons-learned from another building, new in 1969, from a university campus a thousand miles away that I always think of when I think about Richardson's own municipal campus. That building is the UW Humanities building on the campus of the University of Wisconsin—Madison. There are lessons for Richardson to learn from that building if you don't want to see a headline like the above sometime in the future.
Those lessons are amply detailed in an article with a similar headline, "How the Humanities Building Went Wrong", in OnWisconsin, the University of Wisconsin—Madison alumni magazine. As that headline implies, there are very few fans of UW's Humanities building, not in 1969 when it opened, nor today when its planned demolition draws closer. Former UW Chancellor John Wiley was reported as wanting to be “the first person to swing a sledgehammer” at UW Humanities.
But I've always had a warm spot in my heart for that building. Here I won't spell out my own reasons why. I'll try to stay focused on lessons for Richardson.
The Site
Think about what face the building presents to the world around it. One myth about it was that it was designed to face the other way, but the construction company got the blueprints mixed up and built it the wrong side around. In fact, that UW Humanities was designed to be the interface between the campus and the city at large. The left side of the building in the photo above faces the campus. There's a courtyard in the building, not visible in the photo above, that opens up to the other side of the building facing the interior of the city block. In 1969 that other side was occupied by an alley and a bunch of old buildings, all overdue for a meeting with a wrecking ball. I can understand why people in 1969 couldn't imagine why the building would deliberately open in that direction. But that alley and those decrepit buildings are long gone now. The alley was replaced by a small park in the center of the block and a network of walkable paths that connect the new buildings on the block with UW Humanities's own entrance to its interior courtyard. UW Humanities now integrates nicely on that side with an art museum, other campus buildings, and the downtown beyond. You can see today's site in the aerial photo below. UW Humanities is overlaid in yellow. The direction of view of it in the top photo is shown by the red arrow.
The lesson for Richardson is that Richardson City Hall's own "neighbors" today are unlikely to resemble City Hall's neighbors in 50 years, at least not if the City encourages good redevelopment. Once all that land is redeveloped, all the way from the retail center on the curve on Arapaho Rd to the mixed-use development at DART's Arapaho Station, will you still want the "front" of Richardson's municipal buildings to face that surface parking lot in the back? Or even for City Hall and the public library to face each other instead of the City at large?
"Town Square" is an excellent image for what the City of Richardson should aspire to on its own large property. The City thinks of that green space around the library fountain as a town square, but you can't have a real town square without the town. And Richardson's site plan lacks a town. Unlike the hulking UW Humanities, I would go tall with City Hall, minimizing its footprint so that the rest of the space can be filled with "town". The architect of UW Humanities couldn't go tall because they needed to preserve the view of the Wisconsin State Capitol from the campus. Richardson doesn't have any such constraint. I would put all of the City offices on the higher floors, increasing security as a side benefit. I would put the public spaces on the ground floor with visual access to a new town square.
The Architectural Style
UW Humanities is Brutalist architecture. I happen to like Brutalist architecture. The Richardson Public Library building is also Brutalist architecture. Judging by the stickers the public affixed to a poster of example architectural styles shown at the public input meeting at Huffines Rec Center, the Richardson public is not a fan of Brutalist architecture. Judging by stickers on another poster, it's "very important" "for the new City Hall and Library to aesthetically relate". So make it aesthetically relate but not Brutalist. Good luck to the architect. Whatever design the City of Richardson chooses for its new City Hall, the design should play nice with the library building. Personally, I happen to think that UW Humanities, on a smaller scale, would look great next to the Richardson library. You're welcome to think otherwise.
The Cost
Reading that article on how UW Humanities "went wrong," it's obvious that a lot of the problems were not with the architectural style of building chosen, but with design details. When cost overruns threatened to prevent completion, cost-cutting measures were adopted that, over a longer time frame, proved fatal to the building's utility.
Simplifications included removing decorative stone from the entrances, omitting snow-melting systems, scaling back acoustic treatments, and leaving interior concrete surfaces bare rather than plastered. The central courtyard, conceived as a joyous gathering space with a large reflecting pool, turned into a gravel pit.It’s likely the budget also affected materials. “We have single-pane windows; we have uninsulated metal panels; we have thin concrete walls so that rebar is blowing the stone and the concrete off,” [Gary Brown, UW’s director of campus planning and landscape architecture] says. “It was all built very economically.”
Source: OnWisconsin.
The lesson for Richardson is to plan for surprises. If the pot of money for a new City Hall is $85 million, don't design an $85 million building. Design a $75 million building so that when the inevitable cost overruns arise, you won't have to adopt cost-cutting redesign measures that you will regret. And don't think that adopting a construction manager at risk (CMAR) delivery method for this project guarantees against cost overruns. How many construction projects in Richardson have recently been indefinitely paused because the construction company went bankrupt?
Last but not least, some of the problems with UW Humanities arose as the university's growth plan evolved. UW Humanities was specifically designed for music performance and for art studios. In the last fifty years, those departments have moved into their own newer buildings, leaving behind space that is not easily repurposed for other uses (think small, soundproof, underground music practice rooms). You might think that Richardson shouldn't have this problem. The basic demands for government work haven't changed in a thousand years (offices, and record storage, as well as a few public rooms). But never say never. The growth of remote work during the pandemic may never be completely reversed. The anticipated growth of AI could eliminate many of the service jobs currently housed in City Hall. Digitalization of records is eliminating the need for paper records. So, just to be safe, you ought to ask yourself what you'll do with all those offices and all that storage space if they are no longer needed in a few decades. Maybe think now about enabling the conversion of the upper floors to residential condos in, say, 25 years. At least don't preclude it with design decisions made in 2023 that lack the imagination of what the future holds.
"City Hall stands tall,
Brutalist heart turns away,
Public's pleas unheard."
— h/t ChatGPT
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