The University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC), in partnership with the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corporation (DLRDC), received a $30,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to prepare a Neighborhood Revitalization Plan for the Pettaway Neighborhood in downtown Little Rock. The grant is one of approximately 20 to 25 grants typically scheduled in the NEA’s annual Access to Artistic Excellence program emphasizing preservation of cultural and historic districts. Planning work will take approximately 10 months and begin this summer.

 In the spirit of the Obama administration’s livable communities initiative, the Pettaway revitalization plan will combine urban redevelopment with affordable housing and public transit planning. The plan will incorporate “low impact development” watershed management featuring green streets that link underutilized parks with new pocket parks, drainage corridors, community gardens, recreation, and pedestrian plazas. A Regulating Street Plan will address transit development patterns in anticipation of a streetcar transit line connecting Pettaway with the downtown business district. A land-use plan will feature pocket neighborhoods with diverse, affordable housing types and mixed uses. The revitalization plan will use townscaping principles with public art to link existing and new neighborhood fabrics that create imagable places within the Pettaway neighborhood.

For the second year, the school partnered with a Little Rock group to design and build an affordable, sustainable home for the historic Pettaway neighborhood. The result is a two-story, 1,000-square-foot, cantilevered home.

Students started the fall semester creating designs in pairs, under the direction of Mark Wise, Visiting Professor. They narrowed those six down to three options – the core, the curtain, and the cantilever designs – that they presented to the community. The cantilever concept won them over, with its two rectangles, stacked and perpendicularly rotated. “It was probably the most exciting and the most kind of conceptually clear design,” Wise said. With four students returning from last year’s project, this house was also a departure from that design. Students built the two modules in a warehouse in south Fayetteville and, in May, shipped them to Little Rock, to finish working on the house.

The house will go on the market for purchase through a continued collaboration with the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corp. This collaboration on design build homes, expected to continue for the next several years, is intended to help revitalize this neighborhood, which was struck by a 1999 tornado.

The size of the lot — about 40 by 100 — required a compact design to fit the house and onsite parking. The house has two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, with an open living, dining and kitchen area downstairs, with a half-bath. Over time, the yellow hue of the cypress rainscreen will weather into a subtle silver, resembling an old barn. To carry the weight of the cantilever — 18 1/2 feet on the front and 11 feet on the back — the long, north and south walls of the top level are big steel trusses. Porches are created in the front and back, expanding the amount of livable space from the small interior footprint. The north wall on the top level is made of Polygal, a translucent polycarbonate material. They wanted this for its insulation value, cost and look. The translucent wall exposes the truss required for the cantilever.

This optional studio is a uniquely holistic educational experience for students, Wise said. “They have a better understanding of the whole process — from design to doing drawings to building it. And the more they know about how things go together, the better they can put things together.” In this program, students also interact with and learn to have empathy for professionals connected to architecture. They realize the importance of clear drawings, as well as timelines, budgets, and being able to adapt when issues arise during the construction process.