Urban Design
Sandpoint Waterfront Design Competition
North Root Architecture participated in Sandpoint’s Downtown Waterfront Design Competition, collaborating with an interdisciplinary design team including First Forty Feet, Greenworks PC, Century West Engineering, and others. Together, we advanced to the 2nd round of the Sandpoint downtown design competition. Our collective effort focused on developing planning concepts and architectural designs that respect the town’s history and culture while addressing its evolution. These concepts were presented to the community and City of Sandpoint.
Key aspects of our design include creating a continuous pedestrian thoroughfare to connect west Sandpoint to City Beach by foot or bicycle, ensuring design congruency with new developments along First & Second Avenue and Cedar Street to preserve historic character while allowing for growth, and celebrating the year-round outdoor environment by accommodating changing lake levels. This includes creating spaces for people in the seasonally underutilized mudflat of Sandcreek to establish a civic center connected to waterways and Sandpoint’s history.
Summer Season
Allowing for existing boat, swimming and wildlife habitat, while contributing to additional restoration efforts, lengthening the waters edge to allow for areas of respite and wildlife habitat year round.
Winter Season
Due to the annual drop in lake levels, the creek bed is exposed for about 6 months out of the year. There are opportunities to provide pathways, play spaces connection to waters edges by turning an underutilized human made mud-flat into a vital and energy filled space. Earthen structures would be built upon the creek floor, revealing itself every fall season to be filled in every spring.
