Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, May 18, 1993                   TAG: 9305180156
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: SANDRA BROWN KELLY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

TECH ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS HAVE VISIONS FOR ROANOKE

But, a small grin begins to build when he explains that the relationship may be "merely synthetic."

Still, there is a synergism between the decorative brick of the old office buildings and the red structure that dominates his vision of a Marxist Roanoke.

"I was trying to realistically look at Roanoke as it would be under a Socialist government," said the fourth-year Virginia Tech architecture student and native Roanoker.

"The results are a little realistic, but more sarcastic," he said.

His work is in the "Utopian Roanoke" exhibit that opens Wednesday at the Science Museum of Roanoke Valley.

The project began as an effort by Professors Scott Gartner and Bill Green to get their Architecture Two students to know Roanoke and then use their imaginations.

"They were asked to think things like: What if the city had funds to build a new library?" said Gartner.

There's only one People's Tower in the show.

Among the designs are a library with a pedestrian throughway, a transportation museum that connects the former Norfolk and Western passenger station to downtown, modern housing behind the facades of existing buildings and circular self-contained communities within the city's oldest section, Gainsboro.

A.J. Brandt of Forest said none of downtown Roanoke's current buildings had the form or power of the trains that move through it daily, so he created one that did, a 200-foot-long curved-side structure eight stories high.

Kirk Hostetter of Pittsburgh sliced the public and private areas of a library with a pedestrian path that continued across Campbell Avenue.

Most of the projects complemented older structures or tried to cope with issues such as what to do with existing buildings like the oldest Norfolk and Western administration office.

Joe Italiano of Floyd said at first he tried to redesign the building for housing.

When he didn't like the results, he hulled it out, retained the brick facade as a giant fence and added new multistory housing inside.

Are the designs buildable?

Who knows.

Gartner said the projects "aren't about specific solutions to Roanoke's problems," but are the students' ideas of what urban life ought to be.

Visitors will have two weeks to contemplate that life before the exhibit on the fourth floor of Center in the Square comes down.