Architect Van Lewis in front of the Salt Lake City’s Fleet Block, where his firm, Method Studio, is developing the northwest parcel.

“Architecture is the way we commit to a political philosophy in a lot of ways.” Van Lewis says it almost in passing, but it carries weight. It suggests buildings aren’t neutral containers for life — they record what a city believes about itself, or at least what it’s willing to stand behind in concrete and steel.

The Fleet Block in Salt Lake City is one of those decisions in progress. On paper, it’s a redevelopment project: housing, retail, transit adjacency, a public art component. In reality, it’s something more complicated — a site where memory, politics, finance, and design are all pressing against each other at once. Lewis finds himself in the middle of all that pressure, and thinks that’s where creativity will emerge. “A clean slate is sort of like empty calories,” he says. Without history, without friction, a project can drift — “unconstrained and sort of flabby.”

Lewis passes the block every day on his commute. He’s been watching it for years with the attention of someone who believes, professionally and personally, that what happens there matters.

The murals went up during the summer of 2020, in the compressed, strange atmosphere of a pandemic overlaid with a national reckoning over police violence. Nobody commissioned them. Nobody designated the site. An artist showed up with paint, and then others did. The city eventually demolished the painted walls — a decision still debated, handled, Lewis allows, with less eloquence than it deserved — but then did something he found genuinely startling: it preserved the block as city-owned land, attached an affordable housing requirement to any development, and issued an RFP that kept the public comment process open. Whatever your opinion of how it handled the murals, the city had formally acknowledged that this ground meant something.

“Lightning struck,” Lewis says. “That is like a lightning strike.”

The Fleet Block murals in 2021. Image by Shawn Rossiter.

He’s not speaking loosely. Lewis is a vice president at Method Studio and has spent thirty years working within the mechanics of development approvals, zoning negotiations, tax credit competitions, and community benefits processes — the unglamorous machinery through which architecture actually gets built. He knows exactly how rarely conditions align for a project to mean something. A full city block, publicly owned, at the terminus of the Nine Line, steps from a new TRAX station, loaded with civic memory, and encumbered by an affordable housing mandate: the constraints, in his view, are not obstacles. They are the project.

When the RFP finally dropped, Lewis brought it to his development partners and made a strategic call: approach the submission not as a conventional finance-heavy package, but as something closer to a design competition. “Our competitors don’t know that it’s a design competition,” he says.

The difference wasn’t just aesthetic — it was about translation. Development proposals are typically dense with spreadsheets and regulatory language, opaque to anyone outside the room. “When the general public can’t understand a finance model, they go online and look for someone who wrote a one-star review of one of your apartment units in Topeka and use that as evidence that you’re monsters. It’s grade-school trolling.” His solution was to use images and narrative to explain not just what the project might look like, but how it functioned — converting the proposal “from the realm of spreadsheets into the realm of comprehensible, memorable narrative.” It worked. They won.

This rendering of Method Studio’s plans for Block A of Fleet Block, featuring an underground parking option, shows the block as if seen from the north. Image courtesy of Van Lewis, Method Studio ©2025, 2026

The Fleet Block proposal is roughly seventy percent affordable units, structured as a twinning deal—two towers pursuing two different LIHTC funding streams simultaneously. The Low Income Housing Tax Credit program is the federal engine behind most affordable development, administered in Utah by the Utah Housing Corporation, and Lewis describes it with the patient fluency of someone who has filed these applications many times and lost some of them. “I do this full time. I’m an affordable housing expert. And still, when we put in an application, it’s like — I don’t know. I hope we get it.” The financial strategy is complex enough that separating the buildings architecturally is not an aesthetic choice but an administrative necessity.

The ground plane of Method Studio’s northwest parcel of the block is fully activated. There may end up being a grocery store—the first in the neighborhood. The site is designed as a genuine through-connection: pedestrians walking the Nine Line arrive at the southeast corner of the block, pass between the two towers through a public plaza, and emerge at the planned TRAX station. The Nine Line itself—the first completed section of the city’s planned Green Loop around downtown—has already transformed its corridor from a dingy secondary street into a genuinely pleasant pedestrian spine, with quality landscaping and new buildings that have drawn consistent foot traffic. The Fleet Block sits at its end like a period at the close of a sentence, except Lewis thinks it should function more like an opening parenthesis.

The Fleet Block, Third West and Ninth South. Method Studio’s residential proposal (Block A, northwest) sits alongside Mercy Housing’s development (Block B, northeast) and the city’s three-acre public open space to the south. The future TRAX station runs along the block’s western edge.

He describes a phenomenon in urban design where two activated hubs placed close enough together don’t simply coexist — they enter into something like a gravitational relationship, pulling everything between them into development. The image he uses is a barbell, or a twin star system: not two circles sitting adjacent, but a zone of activation that fills the space between them. Some of the most depressed property downtown sits directly between the Fleet Block and Main Street. Lewis is clear-eyed about what that means—gentrification, rising values, displacement pressure—and equally clear that the affordable housing mandate embedded in this project is one of the few tools available to buffer against it.

None of that happens without community sign-off, and the Fleet Block will be among the first projects to go through Salt Lake City’s new Community Benefits Agreement process—a formalized mechanism for turning neighborhood input into binding development requirements. In theory, the CBA gives actual neighbors the loudest voice: not someone with opinions about the block who lives at the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, but the tailor on Third West crammed between apartment buildings, the residents of the Granary District who will use the plaza daily. In practice, Lewis says, it’s genuinely hard. Community input produces real demands, and the development team and city planners then have to figure out how to honor the spirit of those demands within the constraints of what’s actually buildable and financeable. Every one of those negotiations is architecture, even when it doesn’t look like it. “I’m a huge fan of community input,” Lewis says. “And it’s super challenging stuff.”

What Lewis is most articulate about—and most impatient with the reluctance to say plainly—is the political philosophy underneath all of it. The American West, he argues, is deeply impoverished in its civic space, not by accident but by design: a region built on efficiency and property rights, with little tradition of the kind of public investment that produces places worth caring about. When a municipal RFP drops for an arts or architecture project, he says, practitioners respond “ravenous — like, finally we get to do something.” And then watch it get watered down. “Everything has to be justified with a spreadsheet.”

He reaches for an analogy. Rare diseases are never cured by the private market alone — no company with shareholders will invest in something that affects too few people to generate profit. Government steps in not because it’s more efficient, but because some problems can’t be solved by a motive other than the public good. Affordable housing is the same. So is high-quality civic space. “In a world entirely driven by the free market, intractable problems that affect lots of people but can’t really be cured — like lupus, or housing affordability — can’t be solved without an infusion of money given generously by the public.”

This rendering of Method Studio’s plans for parcel A of Fleet Block, featuring an above-ground parking option disguised by a landscaped elevated courtyard, shows the block as if seen from the south, above the public green space. Image courtesy of Van Lewis, Method Studio ©2025, 2026

He says this not as abstraction but as someone trying to build 200 units of housing, most of them affordable, on a city block that has already seen what happens when a community decides, spontaneously and without instruction, that a place matters.

The last building in Salt Lake City that Lewis can point to as something people mention to out-of-state friends is the downtown public library, opened around 2002. He’s quick to say the architecture isn’t the point—what matters is what it did: created a genuinely active civic corner, a space that acknowledges city government and commerce simultaneously, with what he calls “a realist, no-BS quality.” Twenty-plus years later, it remains his example. The city is overdue for another one.

The Fleet Block project is still years from completion, assuming it completes at all. The tax credit applications haven’t been filed. The Community Benefits Agreement process has yet to run its full course. The public meetings, the negotiations, the horse-trading over program and priorities, the possibility that the whole thing stalls or gets scaled back beyond recognition: all of it is still ahead.

And yet Lewis drives past the site twice a day. On the same day he once watched a family assemble a small shrine in front of one of the memorial murals—a son, maybe, a cousin, a brother—someone threw black paint across the face of George Floyd’s portrait. By the next morning it had already been repainted. That is the history this project inherits. That is what the spreadsheets can’t capture and the CBA process can’t mandate and no RFP language has ever figured out how to require.

“If we build this,” he says, “you have to remember that moment.”

The demolition of the Fleet Block in March, 2025. Image by Steve Coray.

_________

While Method Studio’s residential development works through the long process of tax credit applications and community benefits negotiations, the city’s parallel project on the southeastern corner of the block is already further along. In March, Salt Lake City’s Department of Public Lands unveiled a concept design for the three-acre Fleet Block Open Space — shaped by public input and intended to support passive recreation, small events, and year-round use. The design, by landscape architecture firm Sasaki, includes garden areas, a walking loop, a central plaza, and a water feature.

Running alongside that effort, the Salt Lake City Arts Council has been conducting a nationwide search for an artist or artist-led team to create what it calls a “central civic landmark” for the space — a major anchor artwork reflecting community-defined values of justice, equity, belonging, and collective healing. The selected artist will also establish a conceptual framework for future artworks by additional community artists. The commission carries a $350,000 budget, funded through the general obligation bond Salt Lake City voters approved in 2022. Finalist proposals are due May 27.

The murals are gone. What comes next is still being decided—by planners, artists, residents, and the accumulated weight of what happened here.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.