IN THE BEGINNING it was easy. There were 483,000 acres of wilderness when the pioneers settled into the Salt Lake Valley. Nobody worried that manmade buildings and farms would dwarf and obliterate the natural environment.
That was 145 years ago, before we had to invent terms like natural environment and indigenous plants to remind us what we were losing.These days, the things we build sometimes dominate the nature we live in. Sometimes we can't see the mountains for the bill-boards.
And that's not all. Sometimes the office towers, the malls and the billboards we build don't even co-exist well with the people who built them.
It's the proper relationship among people, nature and the built environment that makes a city livable, says Stephen A. Goldsmith of the Urban Design Coalition.
It is this relationship that the coalition and the Salt Lake City Arts Council hope to promote in the eighth annual Urban Design Awards.
As usual, the awards are people's choice. You are invited to vote for your favorite examples of urban design (see the accompanying ballot).
"What we're really talking about is edges," Goldsmith explains.
Just as a piece of furniture can have a hard or soft edge, so can various elements of a city. The place where the city meets the natural environment of the foothills, for example, is an edge. City planners call that the "urban edge."
But there are other edges, too: the edge of a neighborhood as it hits up against a busy road that children have trouble crossing on their way to school; the edge of a downtown mall that makes pedestrians fight for sidewalk space with cars trying to enter the parking garage.
Making your way through a poorly designed city is like walking through the front door of your house and tripping over your kids' shoes, says Goldsmith. A well-designed city has few obstacles to trip over, both literally and visually.
An example of a well-designed community, says Urban Design Coalition member and local architect Peggy McDonough, is Seaside in Florida, where building lots, the buildings themselves and the roads were designed to create a feeling of intimacy - and a connection to the seashore - for the people who live there.
This year's Urban Design Awards will cover the past, present and future. Voters are asked to nominate Salt Lake buildings, roads, parks, etc. that blend well with either the natural environment, people or both.
The "future" category allows voters to dream up their fantasy project or vote for a project that has been proposed but is on a back burner somewhere.
Present projects would be those almost completed or just under way. Past projects are those built sometime in the past 145 years.
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(Urban Design Awards Ballot)
This year's Urban Design Awards focus on the way the city blends with nature and with people.
PAST:
I nominate the following existing project in Salt Lake City that demonstrates a good relationship between the built and natural environments, or the built environment and the people who use it:
_________________________________________
Present:
I nominate the following project, currently under construction or under study, in Salt Lake City that demonstrates a good relationship between the built and natural environments, or the built environment and the people who use it:
________________________________________
Future:
I nominate the following fantasy project I would like to see built in Salt Lake City that would demonstrate a good relaltionship between the built and natural environments, or the built environment and the people who use it:
_________________________________________
Mail ballots to: Urban Design Awards
Salt Lake City Arts Council
54 Finch Lane
Salt Lake City, Ut 84102