Soul of the City is back! If you missed the kickoff event in February, then Wednesday April 25th is your next opportunity to participate in this engaging community dialogue series. This installment will follow the same interactive 'live-audience-questionnaire' format and will focus specifically on identifying special urban open spaces in our region. What do you think makes a good place to visit in our urban environment? Where are the most successful examples? Join us for this lively discussion that seeks to define where they are and what makes them great. This is the second of five planned dialogues this year which seek to bring designers and community members together to identify what qu

Please join us on Wednesday evening, August 24th beginning at 5:45pm for this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD). “Complete Streets” is the inspiring story of the planning, re-design and transfiguration of West Sacramento’s main street area: West Capitol Avenue. The project completely transformed a portion of old highway US 40 with a wide variety of improvements including new, widened sidewalks, re-structured roads, contiguous bicycle lanes, pocket plazas, landscape plantings and iconic bus shelters which celebrate the City’s unique identity. The re-development of this area has served to foster community spirit by addressing the needs of West Sacramento’s residents and employee

There's a lot more green on a tree than just its leaves! At this month's 4WDD ISA-Certified Arborist Scott Gregory will talk about assessing the economic and environmental benefits of the urban forest. In April, Scott successfully defended his master's thesis, "Quantifying Street Tree Function and Distribution: Analysis of Environmental Services, Population Characteristics, and Sidewalk Uplift in the City of Chico, California". His thesis entailed inventory of 34,950 street trees, stumps, and available planting sites within the City of Chico and subsequent data analysis to quantify environmental services provided by the City's street trees. By identifying public and private trees in adva

Please join us on Wednesday evening, May 25th beginning at 5:45pm at the AIA Central Valley Chapter office for the this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD). Gus Fischer, Architect and Partner with Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects will present their project, The California Independent System Operator (CA ISO) Headquarters facility. Gus will discuss how they are achieving LEED Platinum and its impact on the culture and community. This secure 275,000 SF complex on a 27 acre site is a consolidation of the organization’s operations, offices and public education components and just completed construction. The event is FREE and open to anyone. Refreshments provided. Please RSVP to info@

How can we design ‘greener’ landscapes in Sacramento?  With the growing focus on water conservation, responsible use of resources, and the impacts of the built environment on human health and well-being, the conversation about what makes a site design ‘green’ is being elevated to a higher level. From pre-design and planning through construction and operations, a new rating system, dubbed ‘SITES’, has been developed which sets the bar for what we can do to design more sustainable places.  Developed to be incorporated into future versions of the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, SITES is currently in its pilot project phase.  Please join us on Wed

In the residential sector, a building that produces as much energy as it consumes, or a Net Zero Energy (NZE) Building, is increasingly technologically viable. Yet, to achieve true scalability, these high-quality, efficient and architecturally advanced buildings must be coupled with affordability. Please join us on Wednesday Evening, Feb 23th beginning at 5:45PM at the AIACV Chapter Office for this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD) where Shilpa Sankaran and Taeko Takagi of ZETA Communities will discuss an innovative approach to achieving affordability with offsite precision-building. The team will also present project case studies and live energy performance tracked by the DOE

Sacramento resident and architect David Sarti posed a contentious question at Thursday night's Urban Design Alliance meeting: Why do Sacramento neighborhoods resist modern architecture? The question spurred an hour-long dialogue that shifted several times among a group of 50 people. It touched on everything from the nature of different Sacramento neighborhoods to form-based architectural codes to the definition of modern architecture itself. But first, Sarti, who recently moved to Sacramento after living in a house he built in Seattle, showed how small urban developments can transform a neighborhood. His "Little Red House," which he built in Seattle in 2006 for around $200,000, including

Parking was the subject Wednesday at the Urban Design Alliance's Design Dialogue, an event that occurs every fourth Wednesday and features a different topic each time. Howard Chan, parking services manager for the Sacramento Department of Transportation, led a discussion about downtown parking, which also included an update about the Central City Parking Master Plan that the City Council adopted in 2006. "We don't really have a parking problem," he said. Chan noted that there are usually enough parking spaces throughout downtown, although not all of the spaces are used efficiently. While the congestion usually lies near the Capitol at the peak time between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., he said, sp

Locals with dismal views of K Street Mall might take heart in the optimistic views shared during a Wednesday night panel. Sacramento may not be a hard urban center like Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston or New York. But the answer to the problems plaguing K Street, from closed streets and empty storefronts to a struggling shopping mall and safety concerns, is not to try to replicate what large cities or the suburbs offer. Emphasizing Sacramento's distinct character is critical to revitalizing K Street and downtown, they said. "This community has a soft-shoe quality. It's very unique, very friendly, very green," said Ken Kay, an urban designer who runs KenKay Associates in San Francisco. "The

A group interested in shaping Sacramento's architectural future had quite a challenge Wednesday night: discussing how to design urban infill in a city whose buildings are viewed as largely mediocre. Figuring out where to go from here is the whole point of the Design Dialogues, sponsored monthly by the Urban Design Alliance and the Sacramento chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). On Wednesday, 40 design and planning professionals, community residents and others met at the AIA offices to discuss how to move the city's structural landscape forward despite the architectural challenges of designing infill projects. The 90-minute dialogue was a give-and-take between participa

“What brings you to Broadway?” Greg Taylor, president of Sacramento’s Urban Design Alliance (UDA), posed this question to city planners, residents, professors and employees that attended a dialogue about Downtown’s popular Broadway held at the American Institute of Architects on Wednesday evening. Taylor answered his own question by saying that Broadway has “great urban character, great bones and great food.” Many agreed that food is Broadway’s main attraction, with popular eateries like Tower Café and Pancake Circus dotting the strip. One woman said that Broadway is a place she feels safe to spend time after hours. Others chimed in that they enjoy perusing specialty shops like R5 Reco

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS - CENTRAL VALLEY (AIACV) presents - 4th WEDNESDAY DESIGN DIALOGUE Join your neighbors, colleagues and friends for the 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue series returning monthly in 2009.Each even numbered month this year, the AIACV will present an Architecture related topic while each odd numbered month, UDA-Sacramento will be presenting a Planning related topic. April’s AIACV Design Dialogue will focus on CATALYST DEVELOPMENTS with a panel presentation by: Ron Vrilakas, Principal, Vrilakas Architects Michael Malinowski, Principal, Applied Architecture Inc. Desmond Parrington, Infill Coordinator, City of Sacramento Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 Time: 6:00-

The smell of stale urine, trash, puddles, cracked pavement - these are the things one might find in a dingy, unkempt alley. But can Sacramento turn those alleys into commercial and residential areas resembling something more like an oasis, complete with plants, permeable pavement and a sense of safety? That is what more than 75 Sacramento residents met to discuss on Wednesday, March 25. A monthly gathering organized by Sacramento's Urban Design Alliance (UDA), this week's dialogue was entitled Alleys in Sacramento's Future, and was standing room only for about a third of the crowd. The meeting began with everyone introducing themselves, viewing a photograph of an alley, and telling what

Urban Design Alliance-Sacramento (UDA) presents 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue: When: March 25, 2009, 6:00-7:30 p.m. Where: AIA Conference Room, 1400 S Street (wheelchair accessible) Admission: FREE EVENT, open to anyone who cares about design.  Please come early, several displays to view! Panel Presentation -- UDA has asked the two developers on the panel -- Jeremy Drucker and Aaron Zeff -- to describe what they initially saw, including where, that inspired them to come up with a comparable development concept for an alley in Sacramento. Tom Pace, the City of Sacramento's Long Range Planning Manager, will comment on alley concepts he has seen in a variety of locations; in addition, he w