Corpus Christi Caller Times

"City Bus Stop Design Selected for Honor"

Adaptable Staples Street prototype earns architecture firm national award

- The local firm was the only Texas award winner.
- It's the first national recognition for the Richter firm.
- These bus stop shelters may be the best design now available, judges said.

Architects David and Elizabeth Chu Richter, partners in marriage and profession, will receive a national award "for their professional design accomplishments" today in a ceremony in Washington, D.C. Richter Associates Architects Inc. will be recognized for design excellence as one of 11 Honor Award winners, and the only one from Texas, in the 1994 Design for Tranportation Awards presented by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

The Richters were selected for the Staples Street bus stops, a $200,000 1993 project funded by the Regional Transportation Authority for design and construction of 25 red metal bus shelters. All but one shelter are along 2 ½ miles of Staples Street from near Six Points to near City Hall. The other shelter is on Leopard Street near the county courthouse.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Federico Pena will present the awards today. About 300 entries were received in the national competition. Victor Gonzalez; chairman of the local RTA, and board member Bob Jones will also attend to receive an award certificate as owners of the project.

"These award winning projects represent some of the best thinking and actions in the transportation field today," said Jane Alexander, chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. "They illustrate the everyday benefits of good design to the American people and show that the federal government values and encourages design excellence."

A 14-member panel of designers and engineers, chaired by architect, Denise Scott Brown of Philadelphia, judged the entries. The awards were for achieving the "highest quality, of design based on international standards," Brown said.

Commenting on the Richter's RTA project the judges said: "Bus shelters must adapt to a variety of physical, climatic and social environments. Hardly, if ever, does one design fit well in all of the places it occupies. The Staples Street bus stop prototype may be the most adaptable and therefore, the best bus shelter design currently available.

"Sidewalk shelters have a significant impact on the use and quality of a sidewalk and its neighbors. This prototype can be modified in response to numerous unique circumstances, thereby facilitating rapport between transit activity, several sidewalk movements and the use of abutting properties."

Elizabeth Chu Richter said the shelters were to be vandal resistant, inexpensive and low maintenance. Because of narrow sidewalks, power poles, cables, signs and building overhangs, the project called for some complex geometric design and several different shelter configurations were used depending on the neighborhood location and environmental mix.

"By reversing the asymmetrical, 13 different siting options were possible," she said. Structures have a narrow profile for open pedestrian ways, minimum surface areas convenient for graffiti and monochrome painted galvanized steel for easy touch-up."

David Richter said the award is the most prestigious and the first national honor the firm has received among its numerous awards.

David Richter said the RTA/Staples Street bus stop project was a rewarding experience and challenge. In older community strips and neighborhoods, sidewalks and street edges were the center of activity and life. In new ones, sidewalks exist only as a footnote, if at all. "This project tried to respect the sidewalk as an important urban place to adapt to its varying contexts and qualities and to add to its vitality and energy," he said.

David Richter has been practicing architecture locally for more than 20 years and has owned his own business since 1979. The firm has seven associate members including four architects. The Richters met while they were architectural students at the University of Texas in Austin in the early 1970s. She joined the firm as a practicing architect in 1989. The Richter firm has won more than 20 major awards over the past 10 years from the Texas Society of Architects and the American Institute of Architects. Among them were Corpus Christi's City Hall, the Water Street Market, the Citizens Bank's Staples branch, First Baptist Church's education wing addition, Falfurrias State Bank, Del Mar College's Fine Arts Center, St. Mark's Episcopal Church, Greenwood branch library, and the Nueces County Community Center.