DESIGNSLAM! Imagines the Future of Standard Knitting Mill

It’s Thursday night and the buzz of conversation rises above the clinking of pint glasses at Alliance Brewing Company on Sevier Avenue. Teams huddle around tables with maps and magic markers. This is DESIGNSLAM!, a rapidfire charette showdown where five teams of architects, planners, students and design-curious citizens have just 60 minutes to reimagine a slice of Knoxville’s urban landscape.

Teams are given a surprise prompt then unleashed with one shared goal: to imagine better spaces. Dustin Durham, executive director of AIA East Tennessee and founder of DESIGNSLAM! host Yes! Knoxville, puts it like this: “When you get a bunch of people with creative tendencies in a room solving a problem, you would be fascinated by the ideas you never thought possible.”

The purpose of DESIGNSLAM!, Dustin says, is twofold: “One, we want to inspire people and remind them of what can be. Because I think too often, especially in a city of our size, we are constrained in our imagination for what we can aspire to be. Building on that is, essentially, collective action. We also want to inspire them to work together to demand better.”

This year’s prompt imagined a district anchored by Standard Knitting Mill (1400 Washington Ave.), a perennial on Knox Heritage’s “Fragile and Fading” list. Knox Heritage Director of Preservation Services Hollie Cook shared some history of the site, dating back to 1900.

Standard began with just 50 employees. By the 1930s, it had grown into Knoxville’s largest textile and knitting mill, employing more than 4,000 people. At its peak, the company was producing over one million garments a week, helping earn Knoxville its once-proud nickname as the “Underwear Capital of the World.”

So, that’s its past. What could its future look like? 

DESIGNSLAM! asks the community to dream big—zoning and other such real-life concerns be damned—and creates space for imagination: if anything is possible, what would you want to see?

The teams got to work. A panel of judges—myself, Hollie Cook, and East Tennessee Community Design Center Executive Director Ellie Kittrell—was tasked with evaluating the proposals, which proved to be a mildly traumatic exercise given the strength and creativity of every team. And honestly urban planning and design don’t neatly reduce to a scoresheet. It’s layered and subjective, and the ideas presented were much more than the sum of their parts. 

Here are the presentations! Teams were encouraged to incorporate rail, so you’ll see that as a running theme. Feel free to share your own ideas in the comments. 

Team #1

Team #2

Team #3

Team #4

Team #5