HORIZON 2: THE CITY STEPS IN, ADVOCACY TO STRUCTURED CONCEPT

(above) Perspective of the entrance of the Neighborhood Center. (below) Perspective of the Neighborhood Center courtyard.

All drawings courtesy of Moule & Polyzoides.

The Evolution of the Regulating Plan

(above) A sketch by Wayne Moody modifying the extreme orthonogality of the first schemes by the New Urbanist members of the charrette team.

As discussed previously, the Civano charrette concluded without team agreement about the eventual form of the project, and without client acceptance of its partial recommendations. Duany Plater-Zyberk (DPZ) was asked to put together what ended up being a relatively incomplete, thin charrette report, one that did not include any of their customary sections on landscape, mobility, infrastructure design, or a code. There were no perspective images produced either. Their report did include a Regulating Plan that incorporated the initial street and block version of the Neighborhood One design, in a generally orthogonal grid form. It proposed the distribution of development intensities per block, into three zones: Neighborhood Center, General, and Edge. These zone designations were early, formative steps towards what was later developed by DPZ as the theory of the transect. This brilliant planning tool proposed that within neighborhoods and towns, uses, densities, and forms be distributed in zones of distinct form character, typically arranged from their center to their edges.

Post-charrette, Moule & Polyzoides were asked to complete their typological studies on houses and housing, and to illustrate them in context through a series of perspectives. Wayne Moody was given the assignment to produce the Specific Plan for the project. A Specific Plan is the kind of planning document that establishes the development standards for a project, including its land uses, thoroughfares, building types, design guidelines, landscape, utility infrastructure, implementation strategies, etc.

The Civano Specific Plan was eventually approved a year later, on October 20, 1997. Moody continued in his stance as chief critic of the work of DPZ with such vehemence that the developers eventually decided to give the subsequent steps for designing Neighborhood One all the way to satisfactory conclusion to Moule & Polyzoides. This became for Moule & Polyzoides an assignment as much in urbanism as in diplomacy. DPZ was out of the picture, but Wayne Moody was widely respected as the godfather of the Civano idea, and his opinions carried the weight of wide public support. No successful scheme could possibly be designed just by him, nor without him.

The definitive Regulating Plan designed by Moule & Polyzoides combined three key ingredients of the work preceding it. It established a grid of interconnected streets and blocks that balanced orthogonal and picturesque geometries. In effect, it resolved, through design, the DPZ-Moody deadlock. The Neighborhood Center remained at the center of the Neighborhood One composition, located at the intersection of the two principal and orthogonal project streets arranged on the four cardinal points. The blocks parallel to Houghton Road also followed the orthogonal geometry. The Neighborhood Center was inflected in its siting towards views of Reddington Pass in the Rincon Mountains. The pattern of streets that followed its rotated geometry, and those intersecting them in plan, constituted the picturesque portion of the grid. The two geometries taken together established the final gestalt of the project.

The streets were designed in plan and section with walkability and livability in mind. They included sidewalk, planting strip, parking lane, travel lane, and occasionally median dimensions and streetscape patterns that highlighted the differences in character among the various parts of this neighborhood. The street details were designed to accommodate a pattern of surface drainage that would maximize water detention and absorption. The Regulating Plan was now clearly readable as a neighborhood defined by an internal network of varied streets and blocks, and surrounded by a potent, preserved desert nature. It was a completed image of place, but also with potential connections to the future phases of the Civano project, then anticipated to take a New Urbanist form.

The other most important contribution of the Moule & Polyzoides Regulating Plan was the accommodation of their charrette-defined house types and styles into the DPZ three initial development intensity zones: the Row Houses, Courtyard Housing, and the Neighborhood Center building incorporated into the Neighborhood Center zone; the University Homes into the Neighborhood General zone; and the Compounds and Desert Country homes into the Neighborhood Edge zone. All blocks were also calibrated in their dimensions by reference to the lot sizes necessary for each building type. This proved to be an extraordinary contribution to the eventual success of the project, enabling the design and construction of every one of the models that builders brought to Civano. And it provided a stable framework for land sales and the evolution of an integrated and highly imageable neighborhood form, a rare point of order in an otherwise bumpy development process.

Wayne Moody eventually blessed this design approach and process. He incorporated the final Regulating Plan into his rather skeletal 1997 Specific Plan. The current form and operational order of Neighborhood One can only be understood as an outcome of the Moule & Polyzoides Regulating Plan and the Wayne Moody Specific Plan, in combination.

(below, top) Diagram of parks, greenways, and boulevards prepared in 2020 (below, bottom) Diagram of Housing Type Distribution by Zone, prepared in 2020

All drawings courtesy of Moule & Polyzoides.

Perspective view of a lane at the Desert Country Homes area of Neighborhood One, illustrating it as a curbless and unpaved thoroughfare. Note the extremely picturesque character of the adjacent houses in the adobe style. They are massed asymmetrically by combining a variety of room-scaled volumes. Drawing courtesy of Moule & Polyzoides.