My passion for historic preservation began when I was young. An admiration for the beauty of old buildings and the extensive details of these structures ultimately led me to pursue a career as an urban planner.…
There is music between the trees in Water Works Park. Hugging the bank of Raccoon River near downtown Des Moines, Iowa, the 1,500-acre riverside woodland area is one of the country’s largest urban parks, an outdoor oasis in the heart of the city.…
In October 2018, RDG Planning and Design hosted its 8thannual Design Residency, a 3-day charette style learning event which gathers the nation’s top graduate students from many fields to address complex community problems.…
At RDG, we are more than just designers and we strive every day to provide opportunities for staff to adopt a series of lifestyles that allow them to achieve balance to their home, work and public lives. Lifestyles that maintain their value as good designers, commitment to sustainable decisions, living a healthy lifestyle, continuous learning, embracing new technology, and all the while having some fun! We…
GIS, also known as Geographic Information Systems, is a software platform bringing understanding to our projects. This platform provides a variety of tools to perform data manipulation. For us at RDG, GIS is a foundational tool utilized in all of our community and regional planning work.…
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Omaha facilitated the “Architecture After School” program with 12 Omaha Public School students from Gilder Elementary School in Bellevue, Nebraska. This program sponsored by RDG, AIA Nebraska Omaha, Kaneko, and Kids Can consisted of eight weekly after school training sessions on discovering architecture and design through Nebraska nature, history, exploration, drawing exercises, and hands-on building activities. …
For RDG, preservation means finding and expressing meaning through new approaches to maintain historic buildings and districts for future generations. We work in this field to contribute to society, because we believe society is enhanced by carrying forward physical representations of our past.…
A senior living environment that is thoughtfully planned and well-designed enables residents with dementia to move around confidently and safely with a greater sense of independence.…
Affordable housing has always been a concern across the country, but multiple factors over the past decade have raised more specific concerns for housing our workforce. The discussion in recent months has expanded to include not just the need for housing, but the type of housing units these particular households need, including rowhouses, duplexes, apartment courts, townhomes, live/work units, and smaller midsized houses.…
Last year, RDG realized a remarkable shift in employee satisfaction, though the accomplishment was not achieved through salary adjustments or management policies. However, we did strategically enhance aspects of the physical office environment by using research-based assessment tools to measure occupant comfort, and then completed a small renovation project targeting the areas identified.…
