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Whether or not the name of a project has any long-term significance is open for debate, but, for many practical purposes, projects need a name.

What’s In a Name?
As I’ve written before, naming a project is tricky. Up until now, our project at 4th and F Streets in West Sac has simply gone by the address (as is currently still reflected on our website). However, to take every project to market named as its street address would get redundant. Each project has its own set of unique characteristics and reflects deeply-held values for LJUrban. In some ways, the name should naturally stem from the over-arching spirit of the project, without getting too arcane or walking too close to marketing (i.e. a name chosen solely for its marketing power). Again, our approach to something relatively simple (and arguably without a long-term value) could be over-kill, but to change the way we approach this would be to step away from the culture of care we’ve built at LJUrban. At the very least, we’ll be using the name a lot, so its nice to have a good feeling, that re-affirms our values when we use it. Some past examples…

B Street West
B Street West was so named to intentionally point toward its location within the urban core, as most “lettered” and “numbered” streets reflect a grid pattern. As noted in an earlier post, we feel strongly that this area of West Sacramento will be as much a part of the urban-core as Midtown.

Newton Booth
Newton Booth references the historic “Newton Booth Assembly” building immediately across the street. Being one of the first high-density, multi-family projects in this neighborhood, the project gave much time and attention to the context in which it was building–the existing neighborhood, a community that we value and care about (and that Vanessa lives in).

The Gallery
The art reference is very intentional. We intend for the Gallery to be an exhibition space on three levels: first, for the Washington Area, second for green building practices and third for the eco-urban projects we’re building in the neighborhood. Plus, it makes a pretty cool name for the coffee shop we’ll be setting up there next year and also for whatever future use this retail space will have in its long-term future.

Anyone into “root words”? I’d love to know the origins of “gallery.” I need to get that Oxford English Dictionary on CD…

Habitat
So, for the Vrilakas project at 620 4th Street, two over-arching decisions stood out in our minds as vitally important to this project: first, creating an interior open space underneath the heritage oak trees that we’re preserving in the hopes that this natural courtyard will help foster a strong sense of community and second: removing the impact of the car on both this open interior space (no drive-throughs) and the street scape by addressing the need for parking with a shared parking garage. “Shared space” seemed to be the overarching concept and as we looked for words to reflect this, Molly came up with Habitat. In this light, its become easy for us to view the project as a micro-habitat, a residential community living in a healthy relationship to the macro-habitat–the surrounding neighborhood and city. Then, of course, there’s the “eco” angle: our goal to decrease the impact of the project on the larger “habitat” of the natural world.

Now, we just have to get ourselves out of the habit of calling the project by its former, temporary name.

Four down; four more to go.
Next up, we’ll be tackling our project at 4th and G. Keep your eyes out for a post soon about the status of this project, which is starting to build some momentum.

Jason