Gensler’s Brian Hubbard talks Nashville’s built form

BY WILLIAM WILLIAMS

Brian Hubbard serves as design director for the Nashville office of international design firm Gensler, a multi-location company for which the original office is located in San Francisco.

Hubbard, who holds a master’s degree from Ball State University in Indiana, has worked as an architect in Nashville since 2011 and was part of the new team that opened the Gensler office in August 2022. He recently sat down with the Post to discuss issues related to the city’s manmade fabric and urban placemaking challenges.

What is your take regarding the multiple projects underway or eyed for Nashville that involve multiple buildings on large sites (for example, Capitol View, Nashville Yards, GBT in Midtown, Hines in Midtown, Congress Group and Centrum in Rutledge Hill, Oracle, etc.)? Can Nashville support so many such developments and are they being designed effectively?

All those projects have fantastic teams with visionary development leadership that will ensure they are being designed with thoughtfulness and purpose.

Can Nashville support them? That’s a multi-level, million-dollar question that requires a working crystal ball. But what I can say is that Nashville has a tremendous economy that continues to prove the need for the development in the pipeline and a planning department working feverishly to plan for a future no one thought possible 10 to 15 years ago. From a supportive capacity viewpoint, we need to understand the challenges ahead of us with utilities, roadways/transit and materials. Nashville isn’t like many other major cities that had large plans that laid the groundwork for such dense environments.

The “effectively” question is, in large part, a planning discussion with these large parcels and multi-building sites — and each location/parcel is different. I can’t speak to all the efficiencies of each one, but I can say there are multiple criteria to consider when designing a large, mixed-use project. From setting up the design drivers all the way to the aesthetics, they are all thinking about how they can provide an experience that is not found elsewhere within Nashville while creating better connectivity and improving the urban condition.

Notwithstanding urban Nashville’s many hills, rivers, viaducts, railroad tracks, street splits, T-intersections, etc. — which allow for both interesting and distinctive buildings and the orientations/arrangements of those structures — what are some other “advantages” Nashville has for future development that a flat and/or excessively gridded (or excessively suburban streetscaped) city might not have?

You said it well at the beginning. The roadways, infrastructure network and lack of a sprawling grid produce interesting parcels that create opportunities for distinctive buildings, view corridors and neighborhoods, not too far off from a city that is planned in a more nodal way.

The topography’s major natural advantage are the intrigue and views it creates. Many have climbed a tree or a hill to see what’s beyond. In an urban environment, you can do this in a building, provided you have access to it. And in Nashville, you can climb to the top of places like Fort Negley or Capitol Hill and take in the 360-degree views of the city. This differentiates us from cities like Houston, Dallas or Chicago, which are flat, gridded metropolises that go on for miles with little difference underfoot. The change in topography allows for moments of discovery and intrigue as you move through the city.

Topography also creates many challenges in shaping the built environment. But like any fantastic opportunity, we’ve turned our weaknesses into strengths. The city’s dense rock, which creates peaks and valleys, is often seen as an obstacle with excavation. But Nashville embraces it and digs in to build parking below grade, providing more groundfloor area and greenspace to the public.

Flat parcels require service, parking and building program entries to all interact on the same level. This can create divisions of ground-floor activation and long stretches of inactivated streetscape. I point to Fifth + Broadway as a prime example. The 36-foot grade difference along both Fifth Avenue and Broadway allows users to enter on grade, walk over the top of parking and pedestrian entries and arrive at the second level of the food hall. This ease of movement activates multiple layers of the project and adds to the excitement drawing people up and into the site.

If you could make changes to the Hyatt Place hotel building on Third Avenue in SoBro — a stucco-skinned structure many local urban placemaking experts and hobbyists alike contend is perhaps the most unattractive large building Nashville’s downtown has landed since 2000 — what would they be? For example, I’ve heard suggestions including an exterior paint job, placing eaves over the windows and adding lightweight aluminum elements to the building’s corners.

Nashville has a great history of exceptional design as well as buildings that are urban infill and background buildings. All these buildings define and supplement the urban fabric. What is important to analyze, as we scrutinize buildings, are the standards and processes put in place to hold every development to the same standard of care and accountability for developing a fantastic urban environment. It extends beyond facades and into the urban activation, so we create a cohesive, pedestrian friendly downtown.

What is an example of a highly underrated downtown building?

Highly underrated might not be the right term now, but the modernist Fairlane Hotel building (formerly the Nashville headquarters of the no longer operational Fidelity Federal Savings & Loan) sat vacant for a long time. Its elegant lines, simple form and sophisticated use of travertine and glass offer elegance — even when it once had graffiti on it.

Given the Music City Center is a building of significance — both in terms of size and economic impact — what are some positive design characteristics and some that could have been more effective?

Music City Center was a foundational addition to Nashville that spurred a hospitality boom. It’s a fantastic economic driver that brings all types of commerce and tourism to the city. As a large conference center in the urban environment, there was careful thought in planning around the vehicular traffic and service trucks to minimize their impact on the urban realm and provide a great user experience.

The landscaping and plaza space allows for a transition of scale, while the building’s transparency and permeable ground floor keeps the internal user connected with the city and the external pedestrian connected to the grid.

As to improvements, you might think about how a large, internally focused building could find more ways to activate the ground floor and provide more urban continuity through ground-floor and plaza programing.

Some locals would like to see Nashville land more buildings that offer timeless materials and forms — structures like Vanderbilt University’s 300-foot-tall Collegiate Gothic Revival-style tower and the Belmont University Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Your thoughts?

I’m not partial to any style if it’s done with thoughtfulness and quality. I appreciate what Vanderbilt has built with the attention to the detail and the diversity of design materiality it brings to Nashville.

What is an example of an outstanding urban space located in another city that would look and function attractively in Nashville? And where would you, hypothetically, place it?

So many singular buildings have contextual relationships with their surroundings that make it hard to choose a singular building. Maybe a twist to the question is to think about what great urban spaces should we consider learning from that support diversity of scale, use and access.

Many city skylines are defined by singular buildings — ours being the Batman Building. But Nashville has an asset that has long been ignored and that shaped it for years: the Cumberland River. Nashville is growing into a city that will be defined by its activated/programmed/accessible spaces and the experiences they provide. Great urban spaces are created through a partnership of thoughtful planning, landscape, programming and creative building solutions that activate the places we seek. Some of the newly completed/planned urban spaces that come to mind are those at the Wharf in Washington D.C., Boston Seaport or Water Street in Tampa. Places like this work with and engage the natural elements their respective cities have to offer and are notable examples of what Nashville could aspire to achieve.

This story first appeared in our sister publication Nashville Post.