The Daily Beacon, Knoxville

Project returns to campus in gallery exhibit

Shalini Shantharaju - Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 31, 2005 issue

The Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture will play host to a new exhibit starting Friday.
The Plan of Nashville: Avenues to a Great City, which runs through Sept. 25, will showcase more than 100 architectural drawings created during a 2-year community visioning process.
Completed in Fall of 2004, the Plan of Nashville involved The University of Tennessee College of Art & Architecture, the Nashville Civic Design Center and hundreds of Nashville citizens who shared their ideas for the development of the city.

" Since 1950, more than 100 individual plans have been proposed for various parts of Nashville. The Plan of Nashville is the first effort to consider the central city in its entirety, develop a community-based vision and identify design principles for metropolitan Nashville’s urban core, the area within the inner interstate highway loop and the neighborhoods adjacent to it," according to the Plan of Nashville Web site.

The Nashville Civic Design Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of a more beautiful and functional city, produced and organized the plan, Gary Gaston, a graduate of the College of Art & Architecture and associate design director of the project said.

" The project has a strong connection to UT. It’s poignant that the first time it’s displayed it’s in Knoxville," Gaston said.

Students and faculty in the College of Art & Architecture played a role in the Plan of Nashville.
Thomas K. Davis, associate professor of architecture and design director of the project, and Mark Schimmenti, professor of architecture and previous design director for the project, have worked closely with the Plan of Nashville throughout its course.

Schimmenti said the project was a vision plan created through community planning sessions. Schimmenti, along with other members of the design team and student interns, went to the affected neighborhoods and sat down with residents for the meetings. The citizens were encouraged to contribute any ideas they had, practical or not. " The idea was ‘Dream the biggest dreams you can’," he said.

The show will display the drawings from the community sessions along with the final drawings produced by the college.

" We provided the leadership and urban design expertise," Schimmenti said. "There is nothing in the plan that didn’t come out of the community meetings.”

" We think the biggest and best dreams of the public need to be illustrated and shown. And we think that once illustrated and shown, they will have a political life, and they will help guide the future," Schimmenti said.

Cindy Spangler, Ewing Gallery collections manager, said that she agreed.
" This exhibition is a great illustration of how public process can determine public policy," Spangler said.

Schimmenti is eagerly awaiting the opening of the exhibit. "There are so many drawings. Nobody has ever seen them all up at the same time. There has never been any room. Some of these drawings are 6 ft. by 6 ft.," he said.

Spangler is currently in the process of displaying all the work for Friday’s opening.
“ The drawings are beautiful and honest expressions of a community's vision for its city," Spangler said.

Visit http://planofnashville.com/ or http://www.civicdesigncenter.org/ for further details on The Plan of Nashville.

Admission to the exhibit is free. The gallery is open to the public on Mondays from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m., Tuesdays through Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sundays from 1p.m. to 4 p.m. The gallery will be closed on Sunday, Sept. 4 and Monday, Sept. 5 for the holiday weekend. Contact the gallery at 974-3200 or visit http://www.ewing-gallery.org/ for additional information.