2009 - Erin and Richard Roark, the recipients of this year's Community Design Award for their outstanding work on the master plan for revitalization of Palumbo Park, make a pretty exceptional team. Erin and Richard have volunteered their skills to help Collaborative clients for years. Most recently, they formed a two-person team and worked with the Palumbo Park Task Force and the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial to create  a conceptual landscape plan for Palumbo Park.

Before the couple decided to take on this project together, the Roarks never had a chance to work together as a husband-wife team on a project outside their home. In their own words, "This was a big step up from renovating the bathroom and designing Christmas cards."

Erin noted that "Palumbo Park was attractive because it could be a social place." The park is visited daily by residents, a local kindergarten, a Tai Chi exercise group, and students at the Fleisher Art Memorial  and the couple saw the opportunity to work with neighbors who wanted to open up the pocket park and turn it into a community living room. "You can't have a wallflower for a park," says Richard.

Describing their approach to the work, Richard noted that "socially meaningful design requires that you know what the memory of  a place is. So, listening to the narrative of the neighbors clarifies the problems and the opportunities for that place. Designers can do their best work when given time to get to know the community."

Erin added that when designers work this way, they seem to gel the community, "the process of creating a design respects the neighbors,  involves thinking carefully and placing things thoughtfully, for those who use them."