Dream makers - Empty warehouse a canvas for ETHS design students

By Kathy Routliffe, Staff Writer
March 30, 2006

Alan Rosen’s classroom was darkened slightly as his 14 architectural design students tired to corral their creative urges on seven different computer screens.

Seven pairs of eyes swept over their three-dimensional digitized schematics of brick lined courtyards, light-filled work-studios, and cleverly concealed underground garages, landscaped and arboreal rooftops seven visions concocted via inspiration, consensus and hard team work.

Steven Yas was calm as he reviewed the designs, but the Evanston architect was clearly pleased at the efforts of the Evanston Township High School students surrounding him in mid February. So Rosen even as he offered suggestions to one team, questioned a second duo on their work and wrangled with a balky computer program for a third couple.

The student teams’ designs were all renovation plans for an empty 40,000 square-foot warehouse, the focus of their interest was no textbook exercise, however, as the building really exists – one block south of the high school, at 2100 Greenwood St.

Teams in competition

Starting last November, the teams began a contest to transform that space into a minimum of 26 residential lofts, each incorporating work space and all of which had to be close to 1,600 square feet in area. Their orders also included creating a homeowner’s gathering space on the site, finding room for 32 parking spaces and hewing to rigorous, environmentally friendly design guideline.

The winning designs will net the wining student design team $150, the second place winners $100 and the third place team $50.

Yas’ firm actually won the contract to design a residential-commercial community within the building‘s framework. He and project partner Lon Porter also are building it.

The construction project reflects long-term efforts by neighborhood activists, elected officials and urban elected boosters to rejuvenate the west side Church Street -Dodge Avenue corridor. Yas has long supported goal and has worked with the Evanston Community Development Corp. wh, whose members are spearheading the latest efforts.

He and district officials spoke last year about possible work study or applied science projects. Eventually the group settled on bringing in Yas himself to teach in Rosen’s class.

“The notion of education and training opportunities came up and I thought it would be great to create something that could be a model for all developers in Evanston,” Yas said.

Real-life applications

Officials as the high school love integrating their curriculum with real-time projects, said Shelley Yates, who heads up the school’s applied sciences and technology department.

“It’s very cool, and we wish more projects like this would fall in our laps,” she said.

Unlike other work study programs hobbled by cost or physical inaccessibility, she said, the Yas project “is right here in our neighborhood. It’s and interesting, novel approach…that brings up issue of neighborhood and land use. “

Yas taught Rosen’s architecture computerized design students roughly once a week starting last September. He showed them the empty warehouse space, covered basic design concepts and then introduced more sophisticated ideas such as architectural symbolism, how drawing relate to built forms and reviews of other Yas designs, including a Shedd Aquarium addition and Evanston Fire Sttion No. 3.

Yas encourages the students’ creatively.

“I tell them, if you’ve got an idea, don’t worry about the existing design,” the architect said.

Traffic and parking

Each project, however had to be anchored by guidelines. Students can build on and out form the vacant warehouse’s existing footprint, but they are expected to take into consideration the real world of neighborhood history, traffic patterns and parking needs.

Yas also gave the class information on Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, environmental design specifications that architects use while creating so-called “green” buildings. Each team has taken up that challenge in different fashions.

So enthusiastically have they done so, Yas said, that some teams have some in at 8 a.m. to extra project work done.

“This is even better that we expected,” Yas acknowledged, while praising Rosen as “brilliant. I call him the professor. The high school is lucky to have him.

“The work (students) are doing is so incredible. It’s college-level work.”

Each team has taken a different route to the goal, he said. One girl, who wants to go into interior architecture, and her team began by designing each living unit and work outward. Others did the opposite.

A synergetic team

Brittany Scurry and Jeremy Davenport, both seniors, said they wanted as much natural lighting as possible in their design. Although they sometimes butted heads about design issues, they ended up completing each other, Scurry said.

Her biggest strength is in detail, while his is in seeing the project’s big picture, the two agreed.

Sophomores Michael Walsh and Aidan Guimond were proud of designing the building with a rooftop courtyard and work out from there.

Junior Aaron Resnick and sophomore Carl Klein said they wanted to engineer as much living and working space as possible for each unit owner, so the occupants don’ need to live in a shoe box.” To do so, Resnick and Klein designed and underground parking area.

Rosen is particularly proud of his students.

“They love this,” he said of the project. “The weren’t thrown by real-world problems, and I’m proud of how they’ve dealt with things.”

Although Yas’ firm will renovate the warehouse with its own designs, he is excited about what his students eventually will produce. All of the projects will be exhibited once the jury makes its decision, and a reception will honor the teams.