Portola Valley: Design-in-four-days town hall? Portola Valley: Design-in-four-days town hall? (January 14, 2004)

** Town may create a master plan for a town complex in a four-day session.

By David Boyce

Almanac Staff Writer

Mention the terms "design-by-committee" and "brainstorming session" and skeptical remarks are likely to follow. But an optimistic response may be as likely these days. In the context of large public construction projects, community involvement is gaining popularity, as the redesign of the World Trade Center site showed.

The Town Council of Portola Valley seems to be gearing up to follow the trend with a plan for a four-day brainstorming session that brings together design experts, residents and a facilitator so as to produce a master plan for a new town office and possibly a library, a multi-purpose room and other facilities at the back of the 11.2-acre park-like Town Center at 765 Portola Road.

Mayor George Comstock and Councilman Ted Driscoll are scheduled to present a statement at the January 14 Town Council meeting that lays out an agenda for the process -- called a charrette -- and a preliminary planning period that may last several weeks.

Traditionally, a town settles on a design by seeking plans from competing architects and builders, a process that can take months. The charrette has a group of professionals working in public from a tightly scripted schedule -- in this case, over four days and evenings -- and taking input from interested residents who choose to participate.

The event has specific daily goals, culminating in a site master plan, phase-by-phase diagrams, cost analysis and images of the buildings, all to be shown to the public at an open house event. The design would be subject to council approval.

"I feel that it's time to get off the dime," Mayor George Comstock told the Almanac recently. "What we're trying to do here is use a process that holds the potential for accomplishing a similar kind of result with a superior design with less elapsed time and less expense to get there."

The charrette would not begin until February at the earliest, Mr. Comstock said.

The charrette plan, prepared by CJW Architecture in Portola Valley and submitted at the December 10 council meeting, would assemble a facilitator, an architect, a landscape architect, structural and civil engineers, a utilities consultant, planners, geologists, a cost consultant, and an artist to quickly render the results of a day's discussion in graphic form.

The plan states an estimated fee for the group's services of $83,115.

Also participating would be members of the town staff and at least one member of the Town Council, Planning Commission or Architecture & Site Control Commission.

The community has been interested in the future of the town offices for some time. Over the summer, a 38-member committee of residents met eight times to discuss the relocation of the complex.
Charrette experiences

The Web site of the National Charrette Institute in Portland, Oregon, lists several cities up and down the Pacific coast that have used charrettes, along with several positive testimonials from city planners.

Bill Lennertz, executive director of the institute, did not have an estimate of how many charrette results are actually used. If a design ends up gathering dust on a shelf, it's most likely that an unsolvable issue came up and undermined it, he said.

"If the right people weren't invited, you might have somebody come out of the woodwork and start a referendum," he said. "I can tell you that when it's done right, the ones that I did were probably 75 percent successful because they had the right components."

"It's a very powerful process, but it can produce a lot of ideas that don't go anywhere," Mr. Lennertz said. "It's all in the preparation. It's all in knowing what you might encounter in a charrette and getting ready for it."

Previous experience is important, he said. Carter Warr, principal at CJW Architecture and a co-manager of the project if it gets the go-ahead, said there are "hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours" of relevant experience in the group he has assembled.

But he noted that while there is experience in the group with one-day charrettes, no one in the group has participated in a four-day effort. "Our experience with charrettes will transcend not having done the four-day process," he said.

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