DECLINING CURTIS : Urbanism in 5 Acts

Declining Curtis Urban Design in Two Acts for Curtis, NE Sponsored by: The Medicine Valley Economic Development Corporation The Curtis Chamber of Commerce & Pepsi-Cola

Curtis is a small town on the high plains of Nebraska. In 1925 it had a railroad station and 1500 citizens. In 1983 the railroad stopped all service along the trunk line that runs past the town and 900 people lived in the town. Today there are 750 people in the town.

Curtis is remote.

Curtis is in decline.

How do you design decline?

town built out to its 1926 maximum density

ACT I : STREETSCAPING & AIR-MARKING

paradigmatic “Manhattanization” of Curtis- universal gridiron

The town is nestled on a small plateau halfway up the north face of the Medicine Creek Valley in Frontier County.

The town is laid out on as much square cartesian gridiron as the plateau can hold. The town has Center Avenue as it’s commercial and social Main Street.

There is no road out of town leading north. The way out of Curtis is an East to West 2 lane highway that crosses Center Avenue. Center Avenue runs out of town to the south; heading across the valley to the county seat of Stockville.

Today’s leaders of Curtis spend their municipal time looking for ways to stem the decline and make the town relevant again. The overwhelming sense in town is that all Curtis needs is an economic “raison d’etre” to fix its ills. The only economy there is agricultural.

We are an academic research unit focusing on the urbanism of small agriclutural towns. Our work is completed through limited funding and “service-learning” based course work.

We were invited to Curtis to look at Center Avenue. We came to town and studied its operation and it’s pleasures.

We first spent a week in Curtis taking careful measure of the place.

The town leaders strongly thought that streetscaping might stem the decline.

southern entrance to town across the valley floor

Our experiences around the high plains suggest otherwise. Urban renewal doesn’t stem solely from streetscaping, it flows from a regeneration fo the way that the city is formed and the way that it is programmed. Over the time we spent in Curtis it became evident that we would need to consider ways that decline could be a design activity.

complete menu of streetscaping projects

The plan of action included a “menu” of potentals such as street furniture, new trees in planters, 20% angled parking, commercial fsigns, new pedestrian scale lighting that could be hung from the existing streetlamps, a hoizontal overhead grid of lights, and (most difficult of all) a paving pattern to break up the expanses of concrete. This paving pattern would be laid out with some sort of continuous or repeating geometry. The paving pattern chosen would have to deal with the fact that the town wouldn’t be able to afford much of whatever it was.

overhead grid of lights

20% parking

pedestrian lighting

trees w/ planters

commercial signs

street furniture

paving pattern

We made a proposal for streetscaping along Center Avenue.

Curtis “writ large”

painting the demarcation line of the Berlin Wall after WWII

The configuration of the paving pattern, no matter what pattern we laid out, seemed arbitrary and beguiled us. What to do? How might this pattern effect the space of the main street? What paving pattern made the most with a minimal amount of pieces or surface area? As witnessed in the inception of the Berlin Wall, just painting a line across urban fabric can have great consequences.

We chose to spell “C-U-R-T-I-S� as our paving pattern.

Curtis “writ large”

This paving pattern is of a much larger scale than typical paving patterns used in streetscaping projects. It uses textual pattern recognition rather than the repetition of geometric patterns in equally spaced and repeating zones or boxes. Does that make a difference? Is the repetition visually necessary or an expediency of construction? We didn’t have much rationale for using “C-U-R-T-I-S” but we didn’t have any rationale for the usual. This way seemed to pave lines of inquiry.

an FAA Flight Map and an example of “Air-Marking” in Brewster, NE

In our observations we discovered that as many people see and experience the town from the air in a day as do from the ground. Curtis is in the flight path of a number of “fly over” air routes. We noticed this and researched it after observing so many contrails in the skies of so many of the photos we took of Curtis.

In the early days of aviation there was a common navigational techique called “Air Marking”. In “AIr Marking” the name of a town would be writ large across the roof and other horizontal surfaces of a building, buildings or on the ground.

Maybe this pattern could be a valuable identifier to all those people in jets heading to and from Denver or San Francisco.

In a new sort of “Air-Mark” Curtis announces itself to “Air Visitors”.

Example Location: The Farmer’s Market

In some instances the overlay of the word C-U-R-T-I-S struck a pragmatic chord immediately. At the intersection of the highway and Center Avenue sits a deserted CMU box that used to be a gas station. Anyone passing through Curtis goes by this facility. The U of the C-U-R-T-I-S crosed this location in town. The edge of the U passes through the box. We read this linear zone as a shed structure from which a farmer’s market could be held. The seemingly random choice of the town name for a paving pattern directly lead to the most persuasive component of the project. We told them about C-U-R-T-I-S after we told them about what this would do for Curtis. They laughed and embraced what it proposed.

With the Farmer’s Market the project began to shift to issues that went beyond the effects of streetscaping. We began to question the image of the town by adding civic space at it’s crossroads. It wouldn’t be a major economic engine in town but it would take on a commercial activity, create visual images for passersby, and a locate a civic space in the center of the town.

old gas station

Center Avenue

east wing of sale shed

‘U’ paving zone

west wing of sale shed

parking

street sign

“getting around” Curtis

So, our menu (or component) thinking formed a plan of action Component thinking is an alternative to the typical master plan because it develops a whole range of sets and options for action through which any combination of these satisfies an overarching effect. It can flex with politics and economics.

This silliness with the paving pattern was raising more and more intriguing issues of urbanism. It still seemed odd to propose all of this streetscaping to a town that hadn’t seen a period of growth since before the depression. It felt like prescribing cosmetic surgery rather than chemotherapy to a terminally ill cancer patient.

Something else was happening as we designed. The town was coming down right before us. Today commercial activities that are open to the public occupy less than 20% of the square footage along the three block main street strip in Curtis. Half of the total interior space at the core of Center Avenue is in disrepair. 25% of the buildings that once filled this strip are now lots, usually acting as parking lots.

In Curtis the predominant urban development isn’t going to be growth, it’ll be decline marked by a gradual “tectonicide” of much of the building stock along the strip. Here’s what we can add to our streetscaping and our capacity to use C-U-R-T-I-S as an organizing pattern. We can design the decline of structures on Center Avenue as part of our scheme. C-U-R-T-I-S makes an interesting goal. The more the town will be identifiable from the air. We think Matta-Clark and Smithson would be proud. Maybe, like a crop circle or stonehenge, the town will be documented and preserved in this grand act of declining Curtis.

ACT II : URBAN NARRATIVE

deterioration along Center Ave.

main intersection with semi-trailers parked at abandoned gas station

We think that Curtis can profit and maybe even grow through a new trace that is initially overlaid and eventually replaces the cartesian gridiron.

isometric diagram of the existing conditions in the town

Step 1) INSCRIBED PAVING Asphalt paving is cut and set into the exisitng paving as a first marking of C-U-R-T-I-S onthe town fabric much in the same way that the painted line reshaped Berlin

isometric diagram of the conditions marked for tectonic subtraction

Step 2) CONTROLLED TECTONICIDE Buildings that make edges in the C-U-R-T-IS are targeted for tectonic subtraction

isometric diagram of the initial inscription of the paved additions

Step 3) LAND FORM MANIPULATION Vacant sites within the C-U-R-T-I-S are transformed with plantings, parks, and land forms

isometric diagram of the zones marked for land manipulation

Step 4) FUTURE GROWTH Possible sites are identified within the lower density of the C-U-R-T-I-S

isometric diagram of the locations marked for future tectonic growth

grid of lights

commercial signage

vegetatable streetscaping

land form manipulations

Finally, we recombined the issues we found in the streetscaping exercise with the urban inscribing process to form a broad menu of opportunities.

farmer’s market (civic space)

future growth envelopes

tectonic subtractions

inscribed paving

inscribing acts

streetscaping acts

This project represents a significant shift in focus for this research unit.

After Curtis we take our time in such towns and look for the opportunity to see chance encounters wherever we go. We are stewards of these places in both their present well-being and in their civic memory. We have to be brave enough and witty enough to say what has to be said in a way that is neither damning nor in a way that reads as polyanna-ish fluff.

In “The Decay of Lying” Oscar Wilde says, “The proper aim of art is the telling of beautiful untrue things.” Over a gradual and long term design process we opened up our own methods to theoretical techniques inherent in designing for decline and became confident enough in what that is to share it directly with a farming community.