Two Sites, Many Possibilities: How Students and Community Partners Are Rethinking County Properties
Aerial view of a student's tests of density and unit distribution within a neighborhood site model, using color-coded massing blocks to study housing layouts and urban relationships.
Two long-overlooked Knox County properties are now subjects of student speculation, community input, and design exploration.
Last fall, an ethics-in-architecture–focused studio series, known as Housing America, began a partnership with the East Tennessee Community Design Center (ETCDC) through its Community Collaborative. Together, they set out to reimagine new possibilities for two county-owned sites: the historic 1948 “old Sears” building at Knox Central and the Knox County Schools Maintenance & Operations facility off E. Fifth Avenue.
Students, led by Professors Ted Shelton, FAIA, and Tricia Stuth, FAIA, in the eighth and ninth iteration of the series, began last fall by examining the urban design opportunities between the two sites, covering approximately a 1.25-mile radius. In small groups, broken into 12 plots, they developed conceptual proposals exploring how the neighborhoods surrounding the county properties could support inclusive housing, adaptive reuse, and empowering revitalization.
“They’re not that far from each other as the crow flies, but how people perceive the connection between each side of the study district is very much affected by infrastructural changes to the city over the last, 100 plus years,” said Stuth. “It is important that our students participate in and have awareness of how one advocates for the built environment through their professional knowledge and their personal interest.”
Students explored the implications that decades of motor infrastructure, pedestrian networks, greenways, and other systems have had on the urban landscape and how those changes may have impacted the two sites situated along former street-carlines. The fall studios, with the ETCDC, invited the public to discuss their work as part of a First Friday art walk in December. Their findings then became the foundation for Shelton and Stuth’s spring studios, which shifts focus to the architectural scale of the historic buildings and surrounding parking lots.
Additionally this spring, the studio will run in parallel with ETCDC’s 2025–26 Community Collaborative—an intensive, design charette where diverse stakeholders brainstorm and develop solutions for a specific project—which kicked off in early February. Registered teams will develop their proposals through April 15.
“The spring studio should be considered a platform,” said Stuth. “The fall was about understanding and learning from a century of these neighborhoods and decades of history and use. We now have an opportunity to explore their transformation and imagine their next roles.”
Students have begun to examine local and international examples of reuse to inspire their focuses for the semester. The results of their semester speculation will be presented in a First Friday exhibition on May 1 along with the ideas generated by the local design community participating in the ETCDC Community Collaborative.
The partnership also yielded a significant architectural revelation for the city. During an on-site project meeting, participants discovered that the Knox County Schools Maintenance & Operations building was in fact designed by Albert Kahn, one of the most influential industrial architects of the 20th century. Often referred to as the “architect of Detroit” for his work on Ford Motor Company factories and other industrial landmarks, Kahn’s work is rare in the South, making the Knoxville building an unexpected and nationally significant find.
“We were already admirers of the building,” Shelton told . “It’s one of those things, when you see it, you go, ‘Oh, that’s what it is.’ But you would never be able to work it back the other way and say, ‘Oh, well, this obviously was that.'”
The discovery has elevated the site’s historic significance and is now shaping how future reuse concepts are being developed.
Beyond Knoxville, the series more broadly has also drawn national recognition. Shelton and Stuth’s Housing America studio series recently received a second , jointly presented by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architects. The award honors innovative housing-focused design education and recognizes the studio’s impact on students, communities and the broader housing discourse.
“There’s not going to be one easy solution to the housing crisis, and people can enter into those issues at a lot of different scales and from diverse perspectives,” said Stuth. “Our students over the years have been exposed to the breadth of those issues through this series. They have gone on to graduate study of housing or come back to share housing knowledge on reviews, while others will contribute to the charette. Their dedication to housing design shows an appreciation for connecting places with their histories and communities.”
The Housing America series has become a sustained model for engaging real communities with real challenges, while giving students hands-on experience navigating the ethical, social, and historical dimensions of housing and urban development. As the studio’s work feeds into ongoing county and community discussions, students’ ideas will continue to inform how Knoxville thinks about the future of these prominent sites.