4 minute read
INTEGRATED SPACES
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FILLING IN THE BLANKS
Nashville’s building boom brings with it new questions and ideas
Even the most optimistic observers of Nashville real estate wouldn’t have predicted the speed of recent development in SoBro and the ever-growing Gulch area. Growth many had considered might require a generation or more has taken less than a decade. And broad, long-term guiding documents have essentially turned into draft blueprints for dozens of apartment blocks and o ce and hotel towers.
On the next few pages, we’ve taken a little license to extrapolate today’s trends and revisit past proposals that haven’t (yet?) made it to groundbreaking. The result is a view into the downtown Nashville of the near future, a much more continuous urban mass whose parts will be more interwoven than ever before. To go with our sketches, we’ve asked some industry pros a few big questions about how this denser, more connected district might — and should — function.
THE GULCH
C C ommuters along the downtown interstate loop can’t miss the activity at the southern tip of The Gulch. Where Terrazzo sat somewhat alone south of Division Street for years now are rising multiple towers that hug the highway. Across Division from them, multiple sites that previously housed single-story structures sport or will soon have their own cranes. To the northwest, meanwhile, Gulch master developer MarketStreet Enterprises still has a handful of spots to redevelop in the heart of the district, including the southeast corner of the prominent intersection of 12th and Demonbreun. On the heels of the building of the “core” Gulch and Capitol View further north has come a phase — led in part by Gulch Crossing and being continued by Asurion’s new headquarters — of building right up the CSX train tracks. Nashville Yards’ towers are adding to that momentum and a similar set of towers could rise in front of Cummins Station: Owner Zach Liff in 2019 went public with sketches of four towers wedged along the tracks from Demonbreun to Cannery Row. We haven’t been as ambitious here as Liff’s vision was then but the basic idea is the same: Much of CSX trains’ journeys through downtown Nashville will soon be in a veritable concrete canyon.
INTEGRATED SPACES
A BOOMING, DENSER CITY CALLS FOR DEVELOPERS
AND ARCHITECTS TO BE EVER MORE INTENTIONAL
ABOUT CONNECTIONS AND INNOVATIONS
BY GEERT DE LOMBAERDE
im Hawkins is all about blurring lines.
K Among the many ripple effects stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic is a much wider acceptance of the blurring of our workspaces. Sure, many of us were putting in shifts at home or cafés before March 2020, but there is now more fluidity than ever in where work takes place — an apartment building’s patio, a flexible common area, a pocket park between two office towers. Hawkins, a founding principal of Hawkins Partners, says people want more flexibility and a greater focus on health and wellness from their workplaces. But the line-blurring extends to other parts of our urban lives, too. The spaces where we live, play and dine when we’re not working are growing closer together, and professionals in the development community have taken note.
“Being architects, we usually think about buildings. But we now also think much more about the spaces in between,” says Curtis Lesh, an associate and project manager at Tuck-Hinton Architecture & Design.
The good news: Many developers and landowners also are increasingly doing so, paying attention to — and paying for — public plazas, street trees and other amenities that create better connections from their buildings to those nearby and to the public space they border. Gone are the days of new buildings having a blank wall stretching hundreds of feet or having a clear-as-day “back” side addressing a side street.
“I still evangelize about these things but it doesn’t take much anymore,” Hawkins says.
Designs are getting better. And not to be discounted as a factor in this dynamic is an element of benign oneupmanship: Many of the ambitious projects being proposed for or built in various parts of the city’s core are being backed by firms new to town and wanting to make a splash.
“It’s testing us in that we want to make sure that what gets developed makes sense and fits in the city,” Lesh says. “But just what that is is changing, too.”
Case in point for that dynamic are two separate three-tower plans announced this summer for both sides of Second Avenue a block south of Korean Veterans Boulevard. The projects by Centrum Realty of Chicago and the Boston-based Congress Group — which also built the nearby Four Seasons tower overlooking the Cumberland River — have been designed to both relate well to each other and around park spaces that will open up to one another across Second.
