Design

Design Makes a Difference: Marriott International Headquarters and Hotel

Posted: by

This is part of a series of Third Place blogs taking a closer look at the winners of Montgomery Planning’s 2023 Design Excellence Awards.

In the book “Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change,” one of the founders of  Congress for The New Urbanism, Peter Calthorpe, defines urbanism in one of the best ways I have read:

Urbanism is a broad term defined by qualities, not quantities; by intensity, not density; by connectivity, not just location. Urbanism is always made from places that are mixed in uses, walkable, human-scaled, and diverse in population; that balance cars with transit; that reinforce local history; that are adaptable; and that support a rich public life. Urbanism can come in many forms, scales, … Continue reading

Design Makes a Difference: Artspace – Silver Spring

Posted: by

This is the second in a series of Third Place blogs taking a closer look at the winners of Montgomery Planning’s 2023 Design Excellence Awards.

Many of the concepts described in Montgomery County’s updated General Plan – Thrive Montgomery 2050 – were created to help support the belief that our physical environment has a direct impact on our chances for happy, prosperous lives. It proposes that within the county, well-designed cities, towns, neighborhoods, and public places are necessary to create complete communities where people and businesses can thrive and prosper.

Thrive 2050 builds on our past successes and proposes modifications to prevailing development patterns of the past 60 years, which focused more on building dispersed, isolated housing far … Continue reading

Design Makes a Difference: The Wilson and The Elm

Posted: by

This is the first in a series of Third Place blogs taking a closer look at the winners of Montgomery Planning’s 2023 Design Excellence Awards.

The best urban places in our region are those that are compact, pedestrian friendly, mixed-use, and supported by transit. The transit, pedestrian, and bicycle systems help to maximize access and mobility while reducing dependence on the automobile. In these places, and in the best neighborhoods in our region, architecture and landscape design defines streets and public spaces as places of shared use. These walkable and visually interesting neighborhoods linked to our natural corridors, parks and preserves are accomplishing many of the goals of Montgomery County’s new General Plan, Thrive Montgomery 2050, and its … Continue reading

Distinguished jury to choose 2023 Design Excellence Award Winners

Posted: by

Distinguished jury to choose 2023 Design Excellence Award Winners

Design excellence in architecture requires balancing the functional goals and artistic vision of a building or landscape to inspire people and support a great community—and, at every scale, it offers the power to help sustain our environmental, social, and economic vitality well into the future.

Montgomery County’s Design Excellence initiatives celebrate architecture and landscapes that make everyday life more beautiful and create spaces that enhance social interaction as well as fulfill specific functions. The annual Design Excellence Awards spotlight our county’s very best designs, and submissions are now open through July 17, 2023. Submit contenders for the two select Awards, one for outstanding Architectural, Urban Design and Landscape design, and … Continue reading

Out-of-Office Reply: Redevelop the Building?

Posted: by

?

Many real estate analysts and pundits are arguing that offices are becoming obsolete, thanks in large part to workers’ continued post-pandemic demand for hybrid or fully remote work schedules.  If this trend persists, planners must grapple with the question: What happens to the vacant space?  In this blog, we examine Montgomery County’s office-vacancy trends and the characteristics of highly vacant office space (which we defined as more than 50% vacant). We also look at the possibilities for redevelopment.  While vacancy isn’t the only factor affecting possible redevelopment of office space, it is significant and the focus of this blog.

Overall Trend

In just the past three years, office-space vacancy has increased dramatically in Montgomery County.  Vacancy rates in … Continue reading

UMD Students ‘Reveal the Art of the Possible’ in Silver Spring

Posted: by

You don’t need to be a novelist to tell a great story; you don’t even have to be a great writer. Storytelling through architectural rendering is a centuries-old way of expressing the relationship between design and the construction of buildings in the world around us. Architectural renderings can also give context to our cultural understanding of places and can inspire visions of those places and our society into the future.

Several groups of graduate students at the University of Maryland School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation set out to tell an architectural design story to reimagine downtown Silver Spring. Professors Matt Bell and Georgianne Matthews guided students in the Graduate Urban Design Studio this past fall as they studied … Continue reading

Finding lost cemeteries in Montgomery County

Posted: by

Learning to read the landscape

Montgomery Planning is exploring the relationship between burial grounds and surrounding landscapes to better understand these sites and find graveyards whose locations have been lost. Cemeteries are important because they are valued by descendants and may hold valuable information about people’s lives historians and genealogists cannot find anywhere else. Since 2017, county law has required Planning staff to keep an inventory of all the graveyards in the county.

Some burial sites in Montgomery County dating to the 1700s and 1800s are no longer visible, and their exact locations have been lost to time. This may be because the graves were never marked, or the markers have been moved or have deteriorated away. Other sites … Continue reading

A vax mandate has helped keep our people safe – and helped us keep doing our jobs

Posted: by

By Casey Anderson, Chair, M-NCPPC and Montgomery Planning Board

When COVID-19 vaccines were certified as safe and effective last fall, employers faced a question with no obvious answer: Would requiring workers to get vaccinated spike turnover at a time when finding and keeping employees is already a struggle? The Maryland National-Capital Park and Planning Commission’s vaccine mandate shows requiring vaccinations helps keep everyone safe without a wave of retirements and resignations.

The Commission adopted a policy on December 1, 2021, requiring all staff to present proof of vaccination or qualify for a medical or religious exemption. About 80% of our 2,156 full-time employees in Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties were already fully vaccinated (defined at the time by the … Continue reading

Montgomery Planning’s 2021 Year in Review

Posted: by

graphic showing the words 2021 year in review

It has been quite a year and I wanted to share some of the highlights from Montgomery Planning’s accomplishments from 2021.

While the update to the county’s General Plan, known as Thrive Montgomery 2050 is working its way through the County Council process, I wanted to reflect on 2021 with the lens of the three main outcomes included in Thrive – which I think of as the “three E’s”: economic health, community equity and environmental resilience.

It’s important to note that much of what is in Thrive is not new but rather reflects how we have been evolving as a county and how we have been planning the county for the past decade. For example, the whole idea of … Continue reading

2021 Design Excellence Awards Jury Announced

Posted: by

In our most recent blog post “2021 Design Excellence – It’s Time to Celebrate!” we wrote about how excellent architectural design not only supports a great public realm, but that it also has the power to attract and inspire people in a way that can sustain our environmental, social and economic vitality well into the future. Architecture, urban, or landscape design at all scales of development has the power to make our world resilient, equitable and better. In Montgomery County, we celebrate architecture and landscape that make the mundane more interesting and creates and improves streetscapes and spaces that enhance human interaction.

Beginning June 21, the Montgomery County Planning Department opened our webpage to accept submissions for the 2021 … Continue reading