Project Update: Acer House Passed Design Review

Acer House, a mixed-used project in Seattle’s Central District, recently passed its Design Recommendations Meeting with the Central Area Design Review Board. The intersection is a cultural and community hub with the Garfield Community Center, NOVA at the Horace Mann School, Garfield High School, Medgar Evers Pool, Quincy Jones Performing Arts Center, and the Eritrean Community Center. The design team includes Schemata Workshop and Donald King, were also the authors of the Central Area Design Guidelines, and therefore Acer House embodies the community values for what development should look like. In a true expression of community voice, both the programming and design of the project has been shaped by community input.

The project is Seattle’s first anti-racist private development project and hopes to be the benchmark for future development around the city. Acer House will be the first project in Seattle to apply Afrofuturist design principles to a mixed-use project - not from the standpoint of high-tech materials, but in the spirit of creating a place where the Black community can see themselves in the past, present and future of the Central Area.

The design faced challenges associated to the scale of the building under current zoning and neighborhood context. To address this, our team, which includes design lead Donald King, collaborated with the Central Area Land Use Review Committee (LURC) to find the right balance of massing and design. Working collaboratively, the team accomplished a solution that fits within the existing environment. The final design solution was approved by the Design Review Board with no critiques. This stamp of approval validates months of hard work the team put into a designing a building that honors the history of the Central District and realizes the vision of what it could be.

Cohousing Patterns: Ceiling Height Variety

“A building in which the ceiling heights are all the same is virtually incapable of making people comfortable.”

It is all too often that the Common House is designed and built with the least funds (many communities prioritize the money for individual units) and therefore, the overall enclosure of the Common House is constructed with the idea that a future mezzanine or second floor will be added later. The resulting spaces for dining, conversation, and meal preparation all occur under a single ceiling.

Provide a variety of ceiling heights that are appropriate for the functions. The dining room may want to be a grand space with high ceilings, however, the kitchen will be more functional with lower ceilings. In addition, smaller seating groups for conversation are not inviting if they are located in a cavernous room with the same ceiling height as the dining room.

Bakken, a cohousing community in Northern Denmark, is comprised of duplexes, triplexes and a large common house. In the common house, the dining and seating area all occur under the same ceiling. The seating area is not welcoming and did not encourage residents to linger and talk. However, over half of the dining room floor framing had been installed with the idea that the second-floor mezzanine would be extended. While the project was never completed, the major framing elements were left in place creating an implied ceiling. The tables under this “lower” ceiling felt more intimate.

The height of a ceiling can also determine the intimacy of a space. The ceiling must be proportionate to the size of the room - a small room with a tall ceiling will feel equally uncomfortable as a large room with a low ceiling. The original pattern describes rules of thumb for ideal width-to-height ratios. The acoustics of any room are affected by the ceiling height and room proportion and should be given specific attention during design.

Cohousing: A New American Dream

Grace Kim takes the virtual stage at the Seoul Cohousing Symposium to discuss the new American dream home, cohousing.

As loneliness becomes a growing health concern across the globe, people are looking for creative solutions to solve this often overlooked issue. A common cause in America is the lack of community that comes along with the “American Dream Home”. We see this happen in suburbs where, despite proximity, it can be rare for people to get to know their neighbors. Cohousing is centered around community; a place where residents feel support from family and friends, belonging, security, and a sense of wellbeing. Sounds pretty nice, right?

Leadership Tomorrow - Geoff's Reflections on Challenge Day 4: Arts + Culture

Schemata Workshop is excited to announce that Principal Geoff Anderson has been selected as a participant in the Leadership Tomorrow (LT) class of 2021.

LT is an intensive civic leadership program focused on interconnections between elements of Seattle Foundation’s “Healthy Community” framework. The program helps participants further develop their leadership skills and practices, focusing on the goal of creating a healthy, just, and inclusive Puget Sound region. In particular, the program has been actively evolving its approach to racial equity, supporting participants’ development as antiracist civic leaders.

Geoff’s Reflection on Challenge Day 4: Arts + Culture

photo of Public Works Program courtesy of Seattle Repertory Theatre

As a fan of many arts and cultural events and organizations around Seattle, I was looking forward to our Arts & Culture Challenge Day. On any normal year I make a habit of attending several plays at the Seattle Repertory Theatre and the Seattle Children’s Theater with my family, operas at McCaw Hall on date nights with my wife, museum shows with my daughter, and of course, and I love to take advantage of the wonderful food by patronizing restaurants around the city. However, in 2020 this topic was burdened with the additional considerations of the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has affected all these cultural institutions, and has disproportionately impacted BIPOC artists and organizations.

For the Challenge Day, we broke into three groups that each had the opportunity to join a conversation with one or two amazing leaders in the Seattle arts and culture community. These included Elishaba Johnson of Wa Na Wari, Tim Lennon of LANGSTON, Brian Carter of 4Culture with Leilani Lewis of the UW, and Angie Kamel of the Seattle Rep’s Public Works program with Becky Witmer of ACT.

I chose the latter because I have a great appreciation for the Rep, and I was curious about their Public Works Program. Angie brought this program to Seattle in the past few years and worked hard to not only explain the program to the Rep’s Board but get them to support it. At the program’s core, it seeks to build diverse relationships throughout the community. They hold workshops with community groups, resulting in a “Grand Play” production with as many as 100 people on stage. Because of the hard work and years of relationship-building, they were able to continue this tradition despite the pandemic, pivoting to a virtual community theater performance of their own musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. This kind of community resilience is inspiring.

We also learned about some of the other amazing creative problem-solving that our local arts organizations have implemented in the past year. According to ArtsFund, 100% of arts organizations are currently offering some sort of digital programming. The Seattle Symphony is broadcasting performances with musicians positioned spread at a safe distance throughout the theater space, including areas normally reserved for the audience. Artists are banding together to create organizations like the Seattle Artists Relief Fund through LANGSTON, and community kitchens are cropping up across the city.  

I particularly enjoyed reading about some of the amazing and diverse restaurateurs who are persevering through the pandemic. It happens that one of the first charitable contributions I made when the pandemic hit was to the Seattle Community Kitchen Collective to support not only the food service workers, but the provision of free meals in the community. My wife and I had been awaiting the opening of Melissa Miranda’s restaurant Musang, and were excited to hear they quickly and innovatively pivoted to this generous concept as soon as the pandemic hit (a stark contrast to the reaction of Tom Douglas). We learned that many other amazing chefs joined the effort, including Chef Kristi Brown of That Brown Girl Cooks and now Communion (who we were lucky enough to have cater our Schemata company holiday party last year!), and Tarik Abdullah who led a grassroots effort to build Feed the People Plaza. These chefs are not only good at their craft but are an inspiration for how to build community and bring people together through arts and culture.

Photo of Feed the People Plaza courtesy of Gabe Guarente / Eater Seattle.

If there is one thing that this pandemic has made me acutely aware of, it’s how much I miss community. Arts and culture organizations are unique endeavors that bring people together to share a collective experience. This is the foundation of building community. I am inspired by the level at which people have rallied to support the arts through this pandemic, but I also worry that it won’t be enough. I believe arts and culture play a role in the health of our community. I am also reminded how important it is to me personally. I write these reflections on Inauguration Day, wondering if a new administration may be willing to support a New Deal-type program that puts an emphasis on saving and restoring arts and cultural programs. What better way to bring unity? I also take it upon myself – what can we each do, professionally and personally, to better support the arts moving forward?

As I finish writing this, I am not only hungry to eat at one of the aforementioned restaurants, but am also feeling like I want to make a better effort at engaging in virtual opportunities to enjoy the arts. I was pleased that our family had kept a tradition of seeing the PNB’s production of the Nutcracker virtually, even dressing up to gather around the TV. It wasn’t quite the same, but I was able to appreciate the close-ups of the costumes in a way I hadn’t been able to from the 3rd balcony.  This piqued my interest – maybe there are added benefits to the virtual format? I am looking forward to engaging in more opportunities in the future that not only support arts and culture and lift my spirits, but also build community across distance. - Geoff Anderson

Leadership Tomorrow - Geoff's Reflections on Challenge Day 3: Health + Wellbeing

Schemata Workshop is excited to announce that Principal Geoff Anderson has been selected as a participant in the Leadership Tomorrow (LT) class of 2021.

LT is an intensive civic leadership program focused on interconnections between elements of Seattle Foundation’s “Healthy Community” framework. The program helps participants further develop their leadership skills and practices, focusing on the goal of creating a healthy, just, and inclusive Puget Sound region. In particular, the program has been actively evolving its approach to racial equity, supporting participants’ development as antiracist civic leaders.

Geoff’s Reflection to Challenge Day 3: Health + Wellbeing

“King County has big racial disparities in coronavirus cases and deaths, according to public-health data”, Seattle Times, 2020

With the heading of Health & Wellbeing, I was expecting to learn about the inequities of our healthcare system and the varying health outcomes along racial and socioeconomic lines. I was not expecting this week to focus instead on our criminal justice system. I have generally supported the elimination of the Seattle youth detention center, which has been in the media for the past few years, but it was impactful to learn more in-depth about the context surrounding the issue.

Money, power, and resources are all social determinants of our health. The World Health Organization has outlined two broad determinants of health: structural and political. These result in the unequal distribution of materials and resources, rendering those who don’t have access more vulnerable. The intermediary determinants are material, psychological, and biological circumstances. The everyday discrimination of black people, and the ongoing segregation of where we live affects our access to medical care, and manifests in poorer health outcomes for BIPOC. Studies show that even education levels cannot help reduce this discrepancy (on average, a white high school graduate will live longer than a black person with a college degree). To learn more, check out the King County Health Disparities Dashboard.

Photo of five-week Restorative Practice course courtesy of Choose 180.

In June 2020, King County made a declaration that racism is a public health crisis and adopted an "Anti-Racism Crisis Response Bill of Rights" which includes goals related to public health, behavioral health, infrastructure and environment, economic development, and the criminal justice system. We ended up spending a significant amount of time discussing the last topic on the list.

The “School to Prison Pipeline” and the impact of youth detention are concepts with which I’m familiar, but I didn’t fully understand the history and the racial biases which continue to play out. The increase of the number of police in schools (under the premise of school safety after incidents like the Columbine School shootings) has resulted in the use of those police as enforcers of discipline for student transgressions. As we all know from the outrage expressed this past summer, this rule enforcement is not distributed fairly amongst white and black students. While students are sent to the principles office at similar rates regardless of race, evidence shows that the enforcement methods used with black students are much more severe, with significantly more expulsions. According to the U.S. Office of Civil Rights, black students are three times more likely to be suspended than their white counterparts for comparable offenses. This makes them highly susceptible to the downward spiral associated with loss of connectivity to the community and other support systems. It does nothing to restore or heal them.  

I am convinced we need to invest more in alternatives to youth detention. We need to invest in the concepts of restorative justice. A great case study on this is the Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth (RJOY) program described in “Discipline with Dignity: Oakland Classrooms try Healing Instead of Punishment.” 

TransformHarm.org outlines the following regarding the concept of Restorative Justice:

Three assumptions underlie Restorative Justice:

• When people and relationships are harmed, needs are created

• The needs created by harms lead to obligations

• The obligations are to heal and “put right” the harms; this is a just response.

Three principles of Restorative Justice reflect these assumptions: A just response:

•  Acknowledges and repairs the harm caused by, and revealed by, wrongdoing (restoration);

• Encourages appropriate responsibility for addressing needs and repairing the harm (accountability);

• Involves those impacted, including the community, in the resolution (engagement).

On this Challenge Day we also got to meet with two very inspiring individuals to discuss these topics: Dr. Ben Danielson, Senior Medical Director of Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic; and Sean Goode, the Executive Director of Choose 180. Both individuals spoke passionately about the need for supporting BIPOC youth in our community.

Sean Good repeatedly spoke to how BIPOC youth are "A possibility to be developed rather than a problem to be dealt with." He talked about how a goal for his organization, which empowers youth and mentors them to have the skills necessary to avoid engagement with the criminal legal system, is to no longer exist.

Dr. Danielson inspired our efforts by asserting that “equity work is the intentional shifting of power - imprisonment is the ultimate taking of power.” He went on to explain how young people’s minds are in development and how the actions taken directly affect their long-term health and wellbeing. It was just a couple weeks after this meeting, that Dr. Danielson made headlines by stepping down from his position at the Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic after more than 20 years, in a statement against the racism that had been accused of existing in the organization.

We should not define people by the worst thing that they have done or that has happened to them, but instead look for the possibilities and potential in people (particularly children), and foster their well-being. Not only will it yield better results for the individual and society as a whole, but it’s also likely a less costly solution. - Geoff Anderson

Stay tuned for the third installment of Geoff’s reflections, coming next week!