Transformational Downtown Design: Building Community Around Creativity

CHALLENGE:
The Heart of the City project in Rochester, MN is true to its name, reinventing the city’s downtown core as a vibrant pedestrian environment. Phase one of the project, centering around renovation of the Peace Plaza, presented the challenge of exercising elegant balance in design.

The plaza connects the Mayo Clinic with two surrounding city blocks full of hotels, shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Its new ambiance needed to be a bridge, serving equally as an uplifting atmosphere for the renowned medical clinic and as a dynamic public space that energizes Rochester’s downtown culture. A community planning exercise kicked off Heart of the City, bringing together firms like Coen+Partners and RSP Architects with public and private stakeholders to arrive at a design masterplan that best represented the needs of all. The group identified twelve core design goals, and a celebration of public art became a guiding method to elevate all the unique aspects of this multifaceted space.

SOLUTION:
Welcoming groups to gather and adapting the plaza for a range of community events, Landscape Forms’ Studio 431 custom division engineered and manufactured an innovative modular platform and seating solution that can completely transform the character of the Peace Plaza. Consisting of twelve large-scale wood and steel platforms, the custom rolling elements fully embrace the community’s desire for dynamic programming while enabling the space to remain uncluttered and celebratory of its permanent art installations and interactive water feature.

In Shane Coen’s eyes, Studio 431’s solution was an overwhelming success, elevating both the aesthetic and functional aspects of Peace Plaza. “These are large benches that you can push and pull and transform,” says the landscape architect and CEO + Founder of Coen+Partners. “You can put them together as a stage, you can turn them into dining tables, you could keep them as sculptural benches, and it all can move across the water throughout the whole plaza.”

Importantly to Coen, the rolling platform solution not only addresses the specific needs of the Heart of the City project, but also serves as inspiration for future public projects. “I think it’s a great model of how to see a stage not as a stagnant element,” he describes. “It’s a great model for flexibility and a great model for a new way to see these types of open public spaces.”