TKWA had been intrigued by the life of a particular block of Wisconsin Avenue for a while and had, on its own dime, intensively studied the reasons for Wisconsin Avenue’s decline over the last 20+ years.  Once this study became public, the new owners of the Grand Avenue Mall were intrigued.  They hired TKWA UrbanLab to analyze the reasons for the Mall’s demise and propose a way to bring vitality to not only their new aquisition but to how the Mall’s redevelopment might bring vitality back to the Avenue itself.  

When the Mall was first developed, Third Street was closed to cars and built over with a glass-roofed, three-story atrium.  The Mall, being inwardly focussed, unwittingly took life off the street and reduced pedestrian activity on Wisconsin Avenue.  One of the many interventions proposed by TKWA was to open what had been Third Street into a pedestrian street and activate its edges with uses brimming with human activity.  Every effort was made to connect, in multiple ways, this new pedestrian street with the city’s existing fabric of streets and walkways, knitting the new development into and strengthening the urban fabric.