This coming weekend the city of Greenbelt will open its doors to local residents, business owners, design professionals, and architecture students by hosting a three day charrette focusing on current and future challenges faced by the city on its 70th anniversary. The session is a component of the “Greener Greenbelt Initiative”, a working partnership between the Potomac Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA-PV) and Greenbelt Homes Inc. (GHI), the housing cooperative that owns and operates Greenbelt’s original New Deal-era homes.

Officials hope the three day charrette, or interactive brainstorming and design session, will foster a creative dialog and result in the development of a long-range plan to help ensure old Greenbelt will continue to serve as a national model for livable communities as it has since its dedication in 1937.

Specifically, a list of prepared goals on the initiative’s website include maintaining the appeal of families, enabling older residents to remain at home in the city, making original housing more energy efficient, and protecting Greenbelt’s nature and open spaces while preserving the community’s character. The “Greener Greenbelt” charrette will occur between Friday, September 28 and Sunday, September 30 at Greenbelt Elementary school, located at 66 Ridge Road.

For more information or to get involved, visit http://www.greenergreenbelt.org.

The Friends Community School (FCS) has been located on 4601 Calvert Road for 21 years, since it was established by the Adelphi Friends [Quaker] Meeting. It has taught K-6 grades, and recently expanded to teach 7th and 8th grades. This past school year was the final term for FCS at Calvert Road. They will move to their new site in Westchester Park on Kenilworth Avenue in the fall. FCS has been leasing the Calvert Road building since its establishment in 1985. The Westchester Park school is being built by FCS through contributions from the FCS community in its Grounding Our Future Campaign. The new site will be the permanent home for the school.

There is strong community interest in Calvert Hills for the old school to remain a school.  College Park City Council voted this past week to explore for 120 days a lab school concept (in partnership with the Prince George’s County School District and the University of Maryland) for the Calvert Road site.   If a lab school does not pan out, the city may consider other options for the use of that site including other school options. The latter scenario would fall in line with an interest from new Prince George’s County superintendent John E. Deasy for more small local community schools.

The new school is 27,000 square feet and sits on 17 wooded acres adjacent to Greenbelt National Park. It will be LEED certified and employ non-load-bearing straw bale technology. Straw is a renewable building resource that acts as superior insulation and is fairly easy to build with. It is equally impervious to fires, insects, high winds and heavy rains as traditional insulation. Straw bale structures typically save on 15% of wood used in a conventional structure. The new FCS is now the largest known straw bale structure in the world.

The new FCS will also feature a vegetated roof, a rain garden designed to limit soil erosion and filter pollutants from rainwater, and flooring that absorbs sunlight and stays warm during winter months. On cloudy days, floors will be heated by water pipes installed underneath.

There is presently a FCS summer camp still at the old Calvert Road school.

See the Gazette’s report on the FCS move.

A small group of city officials and citizens gathered at the Greenbelt Metro station this morning to observe a balloon demonstration intended to provide residents with a way to gauge the potential impact of the Greenbelt Towne Center project. According to the latest plans provided to demonstration attendees, the current proposal includes over a dozen buildings ranging up to 18 stories. The demonstration included 6 balloons, designed to provide a sense of size to neighborhood residents. The entire complex will include over 2 million square feet of retail and office space, two 150 room hotels, over 1,200 residential units, and a whopping 14,000 parking spaces. The project also includes a section containing townhomes now under construction south of the station along the railroad tracks.

In the photo above, city staff and residents stand in the backyard of city Councilmember John Krouse, who is concerned about the increased density of the project. The view from his backyard (seen below) directly overlooks the Metro and project site. Krouse and other neighborhood residents object to recent changes to the plan that has introduced two 12-story buildings immediately at the Metro Station, instead of making those buildings four stories and “stepping up” to the taller buildings farther into the site.

As we have previously reported the plans we have obtained show the project will contain a one acre park at the exit of the station, and will involve reconfiguring the ramps connecting it to the beltway. Click here for a closer look at the open space site plan shown below.

More images from the balloon demonstration and related to the project are available here.

Just up the road from College Park, work has begun on the first of two projects in Greenbelt that could add roughly 8,000 homes and millions of square feet of office and retail space to the town, founded during the Great Depression as a federally-sponsored model city. Years in the planning, the projects continue to elicit mixed emotions from residents of the close-knit community and the surrounding neighborhoods worried about traffic, crime, and other impacts of development.

Work has begun on the massive Greenbelt Station Towne Centre, a large multi-use project planned for 240 acres of land adjacent the Greenbelt Metro station. The project is being developed by Petrie Ross Ventures. As it is currently planned, the finished project will feature approximately 2,200 “luxury” residential units, over 1 million square feet of retail, and 1 million square feet of office space in a complex of rowhomes and towers up to 12 stories tall, however the developer told the College Park City Council they are considering even taller buildings – up to 18 stories. The developer estimates the project could result in over 7,000 jobs when complete. Interested buyers can register with Pulte homes to be added to a list for more information. Detailed information about the project’s conceptual site plan approval from the county is available on this website.

The Diamondback reported in August of 2005 that the developer and the College Park City Council negotiated an agreement where the project’s builder would pay the city $2.5 million and construct a pedestrian walkway to connect the project with the city of College Park. An open space concept plan we obtained from December includes over three acres of plazas and parks, including a 1-acre plaza at the entrance of the metro station, shown below:

We will examine the controversial second major project, Springhill Lake, and a proposal by the owners of Beltway Plaza for residential construction on their property in a subsequent post. The New York Times recently examined the projects in the article, “Merging the Old With the New In a Washington Suburb.”