Street Smarts

By David Gibson

I'm sitting in the window of a restaurant in Chelsea looking out at the streetscape, reminiscing about a great little restaurant that used to sit across the street. Called Eighteenth and Eighth, it was a cozy place in a handsome early nineteenth-century brick row house. That building was a fragment of old New York. Alas it and its two neighbors have been replaced by an ugly bank that adds nothing to the neighborhood and looks like any bank anywhere.

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Placemaking in Provo

 An Interview with Sharmi Patel

Two Twelve was recently selected to develop a comprehensive wayfinding and signage system for the city of Provo, Utah. Sharmi Patel is a Senior Designer who has been at Two Twelve for 3 years and is a senior designer on the team for the Downtown Provo City Wayfinding project.

What were you doing in Provo?

We went to Utah to kick off the downtown Provo wayfinding project. Our first step in all downtown wayfinding projects is to conduct site surveys, interview stakeholders, and generally get to know the town in order to proceed with our wayfinding analysis, strategy, and design. One of the groups we met with in Provo was the Strike Force, a group comprised of city government officials and others who meet regularly to work on initiatives to better Provo. One of the gentlemen on the Strike Force told us that we happened to be in town on the first day of the new FrontRunner suburban train service. The ribbon cutting was happening later that day and he invited us to attend. This was a great opportunity for us to witness first hand how the community runs and what the people and culture of Provo are like.

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