2005-01-21 TSUFFOLKOPUAA - Laserfiche WebLink

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RIEHM:Michael Riehm. Im with the firm of Riehm Ownesby Planners Architects. The address is 75-128 Kamilo Street, Kailua-Kona. Thank you, Sidney. When we approach projects like this, especially commercial projects, one of the most difficult things to do is to fit them into the neighborhood, not only aesthetically and in terms of the architecture but also in terms of traffic and, most importantly, pedestrians. So when we first looked at this project, our goal was to make it neighborhood-friendly and to fit it into the local environment as best as we could. What we first looked at was rather than allowing the commercial to go all along the frontage of the highway here, we decided to do a much more compact shopping village. The main reason for doing that was by making it more compact we could put more services closer to people who would park in this facility that would help mitigate them fromdrivingfromoneshoptotheotherusingtheircar.Sobyputtingthevastamountof commercial services, which would be mixed use, including both retail and office, everybody who would park in the shopping center would be within a two-minute walking distance of any shop in the project. The other thing that we looked at was integrating it into the community in terms of secondary road access. Like Sidney said, this would be a multi-family rental project. We decided to have a connector street that could go in and attach this, providing more circular access around the center. One of the things that is real important to us is making this a pedestrian-oriented center. And things, studies have shown that if you provide a safe walking distance, a five-minute walking distance, that people will use or walk to a destination versus driving a car. So the location of this center, particularly in relationship to the other development, most of these residents would be within a five-minute walking distance of these basic services. The other thing that we wanted to do was to create a character in this neighborhood, this neighborhood shopping center. That was more of a, what I would call a traditional town development versus what Sidney had said before, you know, avoiding the look of a strip shopping center. And some of the devices that we use are, Ill go ahead and point those out. As you come into the project, we want to create what we would call more of like a main street character; and this is a character that would encourage pedestrian activities. We would have a mixed use of office and retail along that. And Ive included some photographs of some examples of what I call pedestrian-oriented commercial villages that I believe you all have copies of. What makes that work is that the architecture, the buildings are brought closer to the street, well provide street trees, traditional lighting fixtures, the parking is done parallel to the street, and it provides a buffer between the pedestrians and the roadway. And were using this main street character to more or less establish the character of this shopping center being more of what we would call a traditional neighborhood development versus a strip shopping center. 11