“Rather than fighting growth and change, Bainbridge Island should make it happen in a positive way, architect Peter Brachvogel says.But, he adds, the opportunities to do so are slipping away.Growth is good if it’s done right. It’s exciting, Brachvogel said. But planners and developers have generally made such a mess of it that it has given growth a bad name.Brachvogel favors traditional neighborhood design, or TND, which he says has the purpose of creating and sustaining community.TND involves a few well-tested principles. Everything should be within a five-minute walk of everything else. There should be enough roads and paths to offer a variety of routes.Building should occur on small lots, with focused open space. And while the automobile should be downplayed, it should be a part of the design.You shouldn’t have to drive across town for everything, Brachvogel said. You can’t have community if you have to get into your car to do everything.A compact, pedestrian-friendly village with a mix of uses sounds exactly like what Bainbridge wants in its core downtown area.But Brachvogel says the opportunities to achieve that are disappearing, particularly the opportunity to create small, pedestrian-friendly blocks. Ideally, he said, there would be at least two other east-west streets between Wyatt Way and Winslow Way. The city almost created one in the drive south of city hall, past BPA and through to Ericksen; it lost an opportunity to create another on Madrona Lane.Brachvogel said the city should have acquired some of the then-vacant land between Ericksen and Madrona to make a through street. Now, an office complex is going up on the lot fronting Ericksen, so the opportunity is gone.We shouldn’t be focusing just on buying lands in the outlying areas, he said. We need to look at the core.Another example, he says, is the recent installation of barricades on Madrone Lane between Winslow Way and city hall. The city administration negotiated an easement for pedestrian access, but the property owner did not agree to let vehicles travel through.I know that’s private property, Brachvogel said, but from a planning standpoint it is absolutely the wrong thing to do. You were starting to see some real life on that alley.Brachvogel grew up in Tacoma. He got a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Washington, and a master’s degree with a community design emphasis from the University of Michigan.After an internship in San Francisco, he moved to Bainbridge in 1988 and began working for a Seattle firm. Two years later, he set up his practice on the island.While his firm, BC&J, employs a total of six people, it’s a family affair. The C is Stella Carosso, Brachvogel’s wife. J is the family cat, whose name is simply J.We were trying to look bigger than we were when we were starting out, he said, because we were going after big work. And Brachvogel and Carosso are not the easiest names to pronounce on the phone.The firm started out doing mostly single-family residences, which is still the bulk of their work. More recently, though, Brachvogel is moving into bigger multiple-dwelling and mixed-use projects.He designed the recently completed the Moorings at Wharfside, a four-unit condominium on Parfitt Way now being marketed by Georg Syvertsen of Deschamps Realty and Associates.And he is working with property owner Mike Okano to replace the former Bainbridge Cleaners building on lower Madison Avenue with a mixed-use project combining residential, office and retail use.Off the island, he is working on a mixed-use development in Poulsbo and on the Roche Harbor Resort in the San Juan Islands, a project he describes as a new village incorporating the TND principals he espouses for Winslow.Brachvogel is also a member of the Bainbridge Planning Commission, and says he frequently finds himself in a position of antagonism to the other members and to the city planning staff.The staff seems to spend a great deal of time studying the obvious, he said. There is little value in what the clients pay the planning staff to do.He also finds the planning commission itself to be increasingly irrelevant.There is very little that the planning department asks us to do, he said. And with the city council’s land-use committee involved in making policy, there is less of a role.Brachvogel is working with other island architects interested in community planning, including Charles Wenzlau and Bruce Anderson, to create a vision for the urban core that people can look at, understand and support.Architecture should be looked at as a service to the client and the community, Brachvogel said. No one person owns the outcome. It should be enjoyed by many people. “