UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Not many Penn State students spend their weekends traveling more than two hours away with their classes, but 14 architecture students in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School did just that during the fall 2023 semester.

Students in the upper-level collaborative community-engaged design directed research studio with Lisa Iulo, associate professor and director of the Hamer Center for Community Design, created urban design proposals for the community of Warren, Pennsylvania. Their plans focus on improving the waterfront and central business district of the small city located in northwest Pennsylvania along the Allegheny River, and address issues and concerns of community residents.

The students broke into four groups, each taking a different approach to some of Warren’s problems based on how students view the best solution. Each group focused on different aspects of the town such as the history of Warren, outdoor recreation, urban context and infrastructure.

Before visiting Warren, the students consulted with Harry Crissy, an agent of Penn State Extension in the College of Agricultural Sciences who connects communities with Penn State resources. For Crissy, the idea for the project started close to home, because his office is in Warren County.

“I saw an opportunity here where Penn State could do something very useful for the community,” Crissy said.

The city of Warren grew with a lumber boom in the 1800s and thrived in the late 1800s after a large pocket of oil was discovered there, according to Donny Reisch, a graduate student in the class.

Warren residents are now looking for a way to bring back some of the tourism and community engagement opportunities that have faded over time. As such, Crissy spoke with Iulo to bring the project to her attention and Warren became the focus of Iulo’s studio.

“The pedagogical goals of the studio are collaborative community-engaged design,” Iulo said. “The collaborative aspect is the students learning to collaborate with one another and work on a team but also to collaborate with and value the input of a community.”

Fifth-year architecture student Hannah Kadrie explained that the community wants to revitalize its waterfront, attract a younger demographic, bring in new businesses and jobs, and bolster community engagement. Her group’s design creates a bike loop to draw people to the riverfront area.

“The big thing about Warren for us that we saw is that there is a national bike route throughout the United States that goes right through Warren,” Kadrie said.

Reisch’s group also focuses on the outdoor engagement of tourists, hoping to make Warren a hotspot for nature lovers and travelers.

“The goal of our design is to make the city of Warren a launching-off point, people’s home away from home, for all the mountain trails,” Reisch said. “We incorporated certain aspects of each other’s ideas and went with a story that we think is the strongest and will appeal most to the community.”

During their weekends in Warren, the students hosted public meetings to reach different community groups in town. They listened to community feedback about local businesses, the waterfront’s needs and problematic existing infrastructure, such as the parking garage and the Blair Corporation building, which remains unoccupied.

“I was talking to this one resident about how we wanted to turn the farmer’s market into a much larger thing, and I found out that she actually owns the farmer’s market,” said Joshua Achampong, a fifth-year architecture student.

Achampong’s group’s design makes the city more pedestrian-focused, adding green space downtown and making the waterfront look more like a campus. They also include public buildings for community engagement.

“The students did an amazing job doing some background research to try and familiarize themselves with Warren and set up an agenda where they ask the community to take them on a tour and to show them things that they may not have seen or otherwise known,” Iulo said.

“Through the community meetings, the students did an amazing job in not just sharing their ideas with the community but also having ways of getting feedback from the community,” she continued. “In the end, that probably shaped their designs and solutions in a way that might have been different than if they just looked at it through another lens.”

At the end of the semester, the classes presented their designs to residents in Warren in the hopes that the city would be inspired to implement some of the designs.

“This might be our project, but it’s their home,” Reisch said.

This spring Taylor Shipton, assistant teaching professor of graphic design in the Stuckeman School, is leading third-year graphic design students in working with the Hamer Center and the Warren community to develop wayfinding and signage for the city in order to continue the co-design work that was initiated by Iulo and the architecture students last semester.