By Kendall Curlee
Photos by Russell Cothren

David Sweere grew up in a classic American suburb in Maumelle, Arkansas, in a single-family home on a corner lot. He recalls a lot of lawn mowing and the fact that “you could see the Kroger grocery store from my house, but you couldn’t walk to it.”

Fast forward through eight years of far-flung military service and six years of architecture school, and Sweere is ready to roll up his sleeves and redesign suburban sprawl. Some key texts, including Jane Jacobs’ Life and Death of American Cities and James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, helped him understand why suburban streets don’t work for pedestrians. A semester in Rome, funded by an Honors College Libby Finch Award, also introduced him to vibrant city streets that do. “That was the best five months of my entire life! The Rome Center is actually on the Via del Cornali, one of the streets included in Allan B. Jacobs’ book Great Streets. For the first time, I lived in a place that’s fully walkable, and I think it had an influence.”

For his honors thesis Sweere decided to document three examples of suburban renewal in the Washington, D.C., area. Thanks to existing urban structures and an efficient mass transit system, the bedroom communities surrounding the capital are ideally suited for “suburban retrofits,” which energize suburbs through the development of denser, more walkable environments. Sweere traveled to the area for one very full weekend, arriving with no advance research, a sketchbook, and eyes wide open. “I wanted a blank slate approach to this, so that I could experience these places through my own eye, as a designer,” he said.

Sweere walked, sketched, diagrammed, photographed and wrote descriptions of three retrofits with the goal of capturing “the sensual qualities of urban form, like the sounds, the temperature, the voices you hear walking down the street, the light quality, the speed of it,” he said. He found Bethesda Row, in Bethesda, Maryland, to be most successful in integrating suburban homes with existing urban fabric. The building scale is modest, and trees and parked cars protect pedestrians from vehicles passing by. Restaurants spill out onto sidewalks, and there’s a steady rhythm of thresholds: “The buildings are constantly reaching out to you and engaging with you, and that’s important, because the pedestrian has to be entertained.” Sweere also noted that a park mediated between the bustle of Bethesda Row and adjacent single-family homes, “something I definitely wouldn’t have gotten if I hadn’t been there, on site.”

The Mosaic District, located furthest from D.C. in Fairfax, Virginia, was least successful. Wide streets were lined with large-scale, upscale buildings with lots of glass but few entrances to engage visitors. “The stores were larger – mostly high-end furniture and décor shops that didn’t drive activity. Restaurants and bars are really the meat and potatoes of walkability.” Experiencing the sites in person was critical, Sweere emphasized: “How does it integrate into the community? Building age, scale, materials, vegetation, and how people are reacting to it – these are things you can only get on site, and it’s a discussion that I think is missing.”

Sweere’s honors thesis, directed by Noah Billig, associate professor of landscape architecture, analyzed the relative merits and failures of these two areas and a third, the Arts District in Hyattsville, Maryland. He expanded on his perceptual and emotional responses to the sites with extensive research, eventually developing an index that defines aspects of walkability, perhaps the most important signifier of successful urban spaces.