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A 120,000 SF project providing 96 units to Cayce Place, Kirkpatrick Park Apartments was the first mixed-income development created for the Envision Cayce Plan and sought to bring into fruition MDHA’s goals of a fully-integrated mixed-income community and providing 1-for-1 replacement units for any housing demolished in order to keep existing residents within Cayce Place. In order to diversify the apartment buildings a mixture of townhomes, stacked flats, and town over flats were used to blend the new buildings into the surrounding historic neighborhoods scale-wise and aesthetically.

One of the focal points of the Kirkpatrick Park design was the inclusion of a woonerf. A woonerf is a Dutch urban planning concept that translates to “living street” and essentially creates a pedestrian focused space where cars are the exception and not the rule as we are used to. Implementing a woonerf serves to calm traffic and lower speed limits as they create no division between vehicles and people and, in the case of Kirkpatrick Park, encourages residents to use the woonerf as an extension of their front porches or turn into a space for community events.

Other elements included pocket parks at the corners of the project, aimed towards children and their families but also including plenty of seating for any member of the community.

If you’ve been keeping up with our Smith Gee Studio instagram page, you might have seen some posts about some of our planning team members attending and presenting at the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) 2022 conference later this month. While they’ll be presenting, Smith Gee Studio will also be awarded the 2021 CNU Charter Aware in the Block, Street, and Building category for this very project! You can read the CNU’s write-up and see the list of everyone involved in the project here.