Duluthisizing Ordean – At variance with excellence

I spent an hour yesterday (a cool break from a hot day’s worth of house painting) going over Johnson Control’s plan for the new eastern high school on the Ordean site. Its a woeful preliminary design.

Its charms are strictly counter-intuitive. It may be hard to convince east Duluthians that they should spend a quarter-of-a-billion dollars to turn their high school into a middle school and their middle school into a high school.

I tried, without success, to make a jpg of the new Ordean site that JC envisions but I failed because my scanner is on the fritz. I’ll post a graphic later. This is the nub of the story. JC doesn’t want to hurt its profits for the project by acquiring sufficient land. Instead it will tripple the size of Ordean on the existing land even though the site is half the size recommended for a high school.

The architect I spoke to has a wonderful resume. He/she is largely responsible for the most stunning and memorable architectural work in Duluth in the last half century. He/she went to the Ordean site after hearing about JC’s proposal and walked the site, something he doubts that JC did. He/she noted adjacent land which could be aquired to allow for some green space between the school and neighbors and an easy in and outflow of traffic to the site. When he sat down with a JC engineer whose initial design crams everything into the existing site his/her suggestions were pooh poohed. When he/she pointed out that the parking lot planned by the engineer would only accomodate 250 cars the engineer claimed it was large enough for 500 cars. Later measurements confirmed the JC engineer wrong. When conceeding that the parking lot might not be big enough the JC engineer shrugged and said, Oh well, we’ll “Duluthisize” it. I guess being a rural, noaccount, school district means we can’t hope to have the kind of amenities found in civilized suburban school districts.

JC’s plan will be no improvement on the East site which already forces students to park blocks away from school on residential streets.

When complaints about the tiny Ordean lot were brought to the School Board, Superintendent Dixon said that Duluth will just ask the state for a varience in order to cram everything onto the insufficient site.

There is a rule of thumb for planning parking spaces at highschools. It says that you should plan to park enough cars to cover 60% of a highschool’s attendance. The new eastern high school will be half-again the size of East since it will take in half of the Central Student body. 60 % of 1,500 students is 900 parking spaces although perhaps not quite that many would be needed because the school will also have ninth graders. Providing adequate parking is just one of several design changes requring modification before we spend a quarter-billion dollars. Its the sort of thing that might be discussed if we weren’t being denied a referendum.

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