GOVERNMENT/POLITICS A4 | OUR COLUMNISTS A6-7 | YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD SCHOOLS A12-15 | HEALTH & LIFESTYLES SECTION B | BUSINESS A17
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halls / fountain city
VOL. 50, NO. 14
APRIL 4, 2011
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Safe at home
A jolly good Fellow!
Newsom Tournament remembers former athlete
Halls grad John Pevy tapped for fellowship program
Halls High School seniors Courtney White and D.J. Sumlin have won the Chris Newsom Memorial Scholarship. Pictured with the winners are Chris’s parents, Hugh and Mary Newsom, at the opening ceremonies of the Chris Newsom Memorial Tournament hosted by Halls Community Park.
See page A-10
Photo by Ruth White
Lost dog Weezer, a male Yorkie, was lost on Old Andersonville Pike on March 28. The owners ask that anyone with information about Weezer call 603-3073 or 925-2311. Photo submitted
FEATURED COLUMNIST LARRY VAN GUILDER
Calling 1-900WHO-KNEW The Shopper’s own ‘Mr. Hotline’ answers some pesky questions about your county government. See page A-4
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First inductees named to Halls High Hall of Fame By Jake Mabe Eddie Bright, Ruth Haynes and Randall Stout have been selected as the inaugural inductees to the Halls High School Alumni Hall of Fame. The trio will be recognized at the annual Halls Alumni Dinner, which will be held 6 p.m. Saturday, April 30, in the Halls High cafeteria, as well as at a special event later in the year. Bright, a 1977 Halls High graduate, is a senior research scientist
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4509 Doris Circle 37918 (865) 922-4136 news@ShopperNewsNow.com ads@ShopperNewsNow.com EDITOR Larry Van Guilder lvgknox@mindspring.com ADVERTISING SALES Patty Fecco fecco@ShopperNewsNow.com Darlene Hutchison hutchisond@ ShopperNewsNow.com Shopper-News is a member of KNS Media Group, published weekly at 4509 Doris Circle, Knoxville, TN, and distributed to 27,825 homes in Halls, Gibbs and Fountain City.
ate, served as the school’s secretary from 1942 until her retirement in 1982. She helped develop the school’s “Dedicated to Excellence” logo and several documents and procedures that were later adopted by the school system. Stout, a 1976 Halls High graduate, is the president and principalin-charge of the Los Angeles based Randall Stout Architects Inc. His projects include the Art Gallery of Alberta (Canada), the Holocaust
Museum in Houston, the Hunter Museum of Art in Chattanooga and several community/civic projects in Germany. Stout’s projects have won numerous awards for excellence in design and have been featured in international publications and exhibitions. Their names will be placed on the Hall of Fame monument at the entrance to Halls High School. The Hall of Fame is a project of the Halls Alumni Association.
Old school trumps ‘new urbanism’ Southwest elementary recycles Gibbs By Larry Van Guilder Northshore Town Center was conceived as a compact urban neighborhood combining residential and retail establishments that featured innovative architecture.
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team leader at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a nationally recognized expert in remote sensing and spatial modeling. In the late 1980s, he developed a national program for mapping coastal changes using satellite imagery for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and received the R&D 100 award, also known as the “Oscar for Inventions,” in 2006 for his population distribution model. Haynes, a 1941 Halls High gradu-
Analysis But the design for a new elementary school, which will become a prominent feature of the development when the school is completed in August 2013, reflects old ideas based on cheap land and outdated acceptance of urban sprawl. The new school’s footprint mimics Gibbs Elementary School. With the exception of its capacity for 200 more students, “It’s exactly like Gibbs,” said Knox County Purchasing Director Hugh Holt. Gibbs Elementary, completed in mid-2000, is a fine facility. But its onestory footprint, suitable where land is plentiful, is out of place in Northshore Town Center. How this “old school” school came to be slated for a neighborhood conceived as a step toward “new urbanism” is a story in itself. Before Cope Associates was selected as the architect for the project and awarded the $542,000 fee, the Knox County Schools system had never used a design competition to select an architect. And although Lanis Cope recently told the Shopper-News that the county wanted to “re-use … (something)
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Gibbs Elementary School served to furnish the design template for the new southwest elementary school. Photo by Ruth White already designed,” the solicitation for proposals issued by county purchasing disagrees. In an addendum to the solicitation, Deputy Director of Purchasing Matt Myers wrote: “All designs will be considered. The intent of the competition is to allow consideration of all facilities, including those that have been previously designed and constructed, not to establish a prototypical design.” Cope’s firm designed Gibbs Elementary School, granting Cope a clear advantage over competitors starting from scratch with the costly design phase. Although there is no indication that the evaluation and selection process was biased (the designs were evaluated “blind,” with nothing to identify the submitter), some bidders were not satisfied. One local architect, who asked to remain anonymous, was scathingly critical of the process: “Knox County public schools,
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handbook adds that “a well-organized design competition, with selection based on ideas rather than past portfolio,” gives the designer an opportunity to “acquire expertise in a new market or building type.” The original ideas in the winning design are notable only for their absence. The usual suspect, money, is driving the school system’s bus. Replicating Gibbs is the economyminded choice, and a school system already faced with deteriorating buildings around the county can hardly be blamed for its decision. The school as designed is a poor choice architecturally and conceptually for the “new urbanite” Northshore Town Center. For a 2 cent property tax hike, the county could generate more than enough for the school system to pay for a building whose design would reflect something other than “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
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meaning the buildings themselves, are remarkable for their mediocrity. I challenge you to find more than one or two built since 1950 which embody architectural merit. The recent ‘competition’ was simply lip service, the anonymous-submission drawings comprising but two ledger-size sheets, in conjunction with the usual non-anonymous boiler plate. A design competition normally involves original work, which then informs the project design developed by the winner.” The American Institute of Architects (AIA) publishes a handbook, “Architectural Design Competitions,” which is comprehensive in scope, beginning with “appropriate conditions” for a competition and ending with “post-competition activities.” According to the AIA, one of the advantages of design competition is to “generate a wide range of new ideas in the approach to a design.” Ironically, the design competition
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