Yet in recent years, Swansea has begun to attract the kind of intense commercial development that Brentwood, home to the Saint Louis Galleria and other "big-box" retailers, has known for decades. National chain stores are sprouting up along the town's main traffic artery, and older homes are being outflanked by newer subdivisions. And while Brentwood is currently planning a new MetroLink light rail station, Swansea recently opened one

Photo by David Kilper

Julia Villa, a dual degree candidate in the Master of Architecture/Master of Urban Design program, created this proposal for an urban farm near Swansea, Ill.

All of which makes the pair a perfect point-counterpoint for the School of Architecture's inaugural Master of Urban Design (MUD) studio. Launched this fall with 12 students, the MUD program is a kind of academic "think tank" for regional urban planners, offering both a one-year, post-professional degree and a dual Master of Architecture/Master of Urban Design.

"Architects today are working on larger and larger scales, and they have to be able to look beyond the boundaries of a specific site," said architecture Dean Cynthia Weese. "They need to be able to see the whole picture, and that includes things like transportation, landscape design and environmental planning."

Led by assistant professor Jacqueline Tatom, who directs the program with fellow assistant professor Tim Franke, the inaugural MUD studio had students create detailed site plans for the areas surrounding the Brentwood and Swansea MetroLink stations. After months of work, a variety of ambitious programs have emerged, ranging from comprehensive residential and commercial developments to Julie Villa's proposed Swansea urban farm, which comes complete with greenhouses, a farmer's market and community gardens.

Heather Daley, a dual degree candidate, focused on the Brentwood site, a dense, oddly shaped parcel shoehorned between the Galleria on the west and Interstate 170 on the east. Taking that density as her starting point, Daley designed a structure that manages to fit shopping, parking, offices and restaurants under one roof, then turned her attention to neighboring buildings and streetscapes.

The resulting promenade weaves commercial infrastructure and human scale into remarkably whole urban fabric, equally legible to pedestrian and driver.

"It's important to understand the context you're building in," Daley said. Architects, she continued, must realize that "there are forces at work other than just your building with your plaza out front, surrounded by your parking. We have to start integrating these things, to redesign our cities in ways that limit the amount of space we take up and allow for reconstruction and growth."

Tatom added that, "we believe very strongly that the quality of everyday life can be enhanced through considered design." At the same time, "You can't turn back the clock. The kind of small town, pedestrian environments that we all think we remember -- frankly, that's just not the scale at which development happens anymore.

"This is a design program about making formal proposals that draw on architecture, landscape and infrastructure planning perspectives; that have a large, even regional scope; and that are not nostalgic," Tatom continued. "We accept a scenario of continued densification because we feel that, to be prepared as professionals, students have to think about the issues and conditions that they'll actually face."

In other words, whether we like it or not, the occasional clean-slate urban renewal project is probably less representative of contemporary design problems than, say, that ubiquitous yet little-considered phenomenon, the suburban parking lot.

"We always think of parking lots as residual spaces, yet they're really this new kind of hybrid we all learn to operate in from the time we're kids," Tatom said. "My daughter is 7, and she already knows how to walk through them -- stay to the side, stay close to Mom. The conventions are part of our way of life.