Our Urban Street at the Mountain project shows off the potential of a diverse neighborhood.
Good urban planning doesn’t typically fail for technical reasons, but it can fail when all invested parties never quite agree on the end product. Ask our planning team what slows a project down and it’s almost always a gap between what different people expect from the same piece of land. At Vertical Arts, we work on alignment from the very beginning.
Our own Partner Sarah Tiedeken O’Brien was recently profiled in Real Estate Business Review on our planning philosophy. Below you’ll find insights on how our team thinks about urban planning, why alignment comes before design, how an integrated studio changes what is possible on a site and where the discipline is headed.
how planning and alignment work hand-in-hand
“A big challenge in the urban planning space is getting all stakeholders on the same page as far as big picture goals, long range planning and immediate steps for implementation,” Sarah said.
Our team aims to reach permitting with a shared understanding of timeline, local priorities, site limits and the trade-offs already made. A broad community vision remains the priority throughout the process.
“We feel passionately about an upfront, interactive envisioning process where we delve into site constraints and talk with community stakeholders to listen and understand the project in a deep, meaningful way,” said Sarah.
Engineering and permitting teams that inherit a documented set of assumptions can work from the same starting point, making revisions stay manageable and the original intent survives contact with construction.
Early schematic site studies help our team test multiple layouts before a design direction is set.
TAILORING SITE DESIGN TO EVOLVING CONSTRAINTS
Rather than apply a template, our planners develop multiple schematic layouts early so clients can weigh the opportunities and constraints of each option side by side before settling on a direction. From there we work alongside landscape architects and civil engineers to turn the strongest concept into a site plan that can actually be built.
“We have a fully integrated team so we can address landscape, architecture and interior design opportunities from the very beginning as the project starts to take shape,” Sarah said.
The Urban Street development blends duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes with three-story apartments.
A STEAMBOAT SPRINGS CASE STUDY IN MIXED TYPOLOGY
The Urban Street development in Steamboat Springs shows the approach in practice. The site was zoned for a conventional large-scale condominium complex. After reassessing community needs, adjacent property typologies and the constraints of the site itself, our team proposed a mixed typology instead. A development that had better flexibility for the missing middle housing market was a better fit.
“We feel that placemaking is an important design and sustainability goal in order to create buildings and site spaces that feel truly integrated into the land and into their communities to stand the test of time,” Tiedeken O’Brien said.
The revised plan combines duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes with three-story apartments. The variety creates a more diverse neighborhood framework and serves a wider range of residents, while keeping the design tied to what the site and community could realistically support.
WHY INTEGRATED PLANNING PROJECTS PROTECTS LONG-TERM VALUE
Coordinating architecture, landscape and planning choices early catches inconsistencies while they are still inexpensive to fix. Just as important, it leaves room to move. A plan built with later phases in mind can absorb new construction methods, affordability pressure or shifting patterns of use without starting over. For owners and communities alike, long-term value tends to come from a plan that works now without locking the site into a single rigid future.
WHAT COMES NEXT: AFFORDABILITY AND NEW TOOLS
Affordability will keep defining urban planning in mountain towns and beyond. Our response is to keep experimenting with construction methods and mixed building strategies that make a project achievable. We are also exploring how artificial intelligence can widen the field of options, testing more scenarios in less time so a planning team can see what it might otherwise never get to.
“Using the tools to think outside the box helps our planning team review more options than previously possible,” Tiedeken O’Brien said.
PLANNING WITH VERTICAL ARTS
If you are evaluating a planning and design partner, look at how a firm turns ideas into workable site plans. Discovery, coordinated disciplines, honest option testing and direct communication matter more than a polished rendering, because a concept has limited value if the process cannot carry it through permitting, engineering and construction.
That integrated approach is now expanding north. Vertical Arts recently opened an office in Bozeman, Montana, joining our studios in Steamboat Springs, Vail and Denver, and we are looking forward to bringing the same quality design process to the Big Sky region and beyond.
Explore our planning and envisioning work to see the process in action. Ready to talk through a site of your own? Get in touch with our team.