Developers lay out apartment ideas

by Amelia Vorpahl

Tuesday, December 4, 2007 00:55

A proposal for the construction of a new 14-story apartment building on West Johnson Street was discussed at a plan commission meeting Monday night.

The 162-unit building would be built on the corner of West Johnson and Mills streets, and would involve the removal of two homes currently there, one at 1022 West Johnson St., and the other at 309 N. Mills St.

A study is being conducted by a housing research group to determine the possibility of moving the homes to available lots instead of demolishing them. However, plans are still tentative, due to problems with land availability.

Bill White, an attorney for the Ten Twenty-Two, LLC development group, part of the difficulty in possibly moving the homes is that many people do not want to share their property.

"It's extremely difficult because property owners, including the city of Madison, are quite jealous about what they have, and are not particularly interested to give up what plans they may have to accommodate another property," White said.

White said although this project involves the removal of these two homes, the city of Madison should look forward to opportunities to modernize.

"I think that we (Madison) have an obligation to reinvent ourselves. I do not think that we need to push all of our new development away," he said. "I do not think that we need to say the house where the son of a mayor once lived is more important."

White added the building would include efficiencies all the way to four bedrooms, however, it would not necessarily be solely for students.

"One of the things we're going to be looking at is the idea of perhaps not student housing, but a little higher grade for researchers who may come in from around the country," he said.

White stressed the importance of keeping buildings modernized and up to fire standards, citing the examples of the recent fires in the campus area.

"As we preserve the outside of buildings, we also have to be aware that there is an inside to these buildings, and it's our obligation to preserve [them]," White said.

The proposed apartment building would include underground parking, as well as parking availability for bicycles and mopeds. Randy Bruce of Knothe and Bruce Architects, LLC also mentioned the accessibility of private study rooms for student, as well as business meetings.

Bruce also talked about the building's architectural design, saying they designed the building to be split into a base, a middle section and the top.

"We created a base around the edge of this building, which is four stories in height, and had four stories tied in architecturally with the streetscape," Bruce said. "We'd like to see a cohesive streetscape and landscape design all the way down University (Avenue) to Johnson Street."

One issue Bruce stressed about the construction plans was keeping the visibility of the bell tower connected to the Lutheran Church near the proposed site.

"It is a beautiful bell tower, so early on we looked at where was this bell tower visible and what impacts would we have on that," Bruce said.