We were excited to check PLACE’s website last Friday and find that the Colorado MOA project is proceeding to the next step. Kudos to Cynthia Madden Leitner and the whole staff at MOA for bringing PLACE to Englewood. Many thanks to PLACE for making the trip and to Chris Velasco for a lucid and intelligent presentation on the organization, its mission and projects last Thursday night.

Our world is balanced on the cusp of cataclysmic social, economic and environmental change. It’s great to discover people and organizations that combine the ability to conceive imaginative and innovative solutions with the practical and entrepreneurial skills necessary to bring them to life.

My husband is a professional artist who has made Englewood his home for thirty years. He has worked tirelessly to promote Englewood as a home for the arts through a previous term as City Councilman, as a former member of the city’s Cultural Arts Commission, and as a founding and long-time board member of Englewood Arts. I’m a construction and historic preservation consultant who has lived here for twenty years.

The PLACE plan seems to echo another Englewood housing development created in times of turmoil — the years immediately following World II. Arapahoe Acres, now a National Register Historic District, was created by Denver designer/developer Edward Hawkins and architect Eugene Sternberg, a Czech war refugee. The neighborhood reflects Hawkins’ interest in the Usonian work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Sternberg’s Bauhaus-influenced education in Prague, his studies at Cambridge, and his experience in site and community planning at the firm of Sir Patrick Abercrombie in London. Like the PLACE project, and unlike most residential ventures of its time, Arapahoe Acres was intended to be a diverse community for families of varying size and financial resources. The houses were oriented on their lots for privacy, and to take best advantage of south and west exposures for solar heating and mountain views. Their construction utilized innovative materials and methods that arose from wartime technology. All of this will sound very familiar to those who heard Chris speak last week!

Ideas relevant to the PLACE project seem to appear everywhere we look: the New York Times’ “Urban Lands of Opportunity,” and “The Arts Collective 3rd Ward Thrives in Bushwick, Brooklyn.” The Denver Post offered “National Energy Lab in Golden a Model of Super Efficiency,” a regional example of a recently completed net-zero energy project.

We both look forward to working with MOA, the city and our fellow citizens to bring PLACE’s remarkable vision to life in Englewood.