Innovation and Research for a Better KC

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There have been a slew of lectures and conferences around Kansas City lately and students at the Kansas City Design Center have been a part of many of them. Kai Uwe Bergmann, of Bjarke Ingels Group, gave a great lecture about the work they have been a part of in the context of the book Hot to Cold by Bjarke Ingels. Jeanne Gang of Studio Gang spoke about the work they have been working on as well as design research based on a concept of Actionable Idealism. We’ve also been attending lectures as a part of the CityAge conference. While not based completely on design, they are concerned with issues and opportunities that arise as the world continues to urbanize and cities continue to grow.

Kai-Uwe is a partner at Bjarke Ingels Group and spoke of the innovative project they’ve been a part of for the last 10 years. While they might not have designed a vision study for a recycling system, at least not one that we know of, Kai-Uwe did discuss certain design ideas and concepts that we could learn from as we move into the programming stage of our project. One of the first concepts Kai discussed was the idea of infrastructure as a public amenity. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 flooded the shoreline of New York City. BIG’s design takes a 10-mile stretch of low-lying geography in Lower Manhattan and turns it into programmed public space. They explored how barriers could become public space while fulfilling a necessity for an engineered structure. The infrastructure is used to not only serve a purpose but also educate the public on sea levels without wasting space. That also adds value to spaces that were previously unusable.

A large part of the recycling vision study involves bringing recycling awareness to the public realm. One way in which we’ve explored doing so is through creating infrastructure that also serves to educate and bring awareness about recycling. We’ve been searching for opportunities in Kansas City for more efficient, well-designed recycling infrastructure. We’ve explored opportunities at bus stops, events, on the street itself. That way, recycling becomes integrated into daily life as you travel around the city. As we explore these opportunities, we are keeping in mind the communities that we are serving. In designing the Dryline, BIG worked with multiple neighborhoods in order to tailor each project along the shoreline to the community it serves. We have been looking into the neighborhoods that we believe could be catalysts and what their needs are in order to design a project that is most beneficial for that focus area.

Bjarke Ingels Group has a project currently under construction for a Waste to Energy plant in
Copenhagen. The facility also doubles as a ski slope that can be used year round by the residents of the city. Those are the types of innovative design ideas that we have been researching and hoping to learn from and apply to our recycling vision study. So while we may not know whether it’ll be an interactive, smart material facility center (what we’ve called a SMRF) or an urban farm for the city grown with compost from the city, we are shooting for an innovative design that can bring recycling to the forefront.

Jeanne Gang had a different view on innovation. During a lecture at the Nelson-Atkins Museum, she discussed the work of Studio Gang in regards to a term she coined called Actionable Idealism. Actionable Idealism is having an idealist’s view of design problems while keeping them actionable. In another sense, reaching for the stars while understanding the real world problems and designing to those as well. While we design this study for recycling in downtown Kansas City, we are trying to innovate and really think of solutions that completely change the way recycling is handled in the city. However, we are very much rooted in the real issues of Kansas City. Our designs are rooted in research on recycling in other cities, the needs of Kansas City, and the implications that the current system has on the region.

Some of the research Studio Gang has been a part of includes research on the morphology of the skyscraper. That research has translated into innovative skyscrapers that positively influence lateral forces of the wind and social interactions between neighbors in towers such as the Aqua Tower, Folsom Bay Tower, and City Hyde Park. Our hopes is that the research and programming we complete this semester can influence recycling behavior of Kansas City’s residents and visitors while making the public realm more enjoyable to inhabit.

The CityAge conference was a chance for us to see the issues that non-designers are facing with a rapidly growing city such as Kansas City. A panel of mayors and professionals in education, engineering, architecture, and countless other fields discussed issues of infrastructure, transportation, education, and public safety in regards to the urban environment. The talks were interesting and informative as well as a way to see how other cities are dealing with a new wave of people that want to live in cities, instead of the suburbs, in order to inhabit a diverse stimulating public realm. That way we can understand where other fields see the future of cities and how urban design fits into that future.

The lessons learned from the Kai Uwe Bergmann and the Jeanne Gang lectures as well as the CityAge conference were all synthesized and discussed then applied to the work produced for professional reviews. We presented to a panel of architects, landscape architects, and planners. The months of research were analyzed and we come to conclusions that are the base for programming the project. We analyzed waste concentrations from 2 perspectives, permanent and temporal/event loads. We then overlapped the two to generate combined opportunity spaces and zones that become recycling hubs in the public realm. The next step will be to program these spaces for specific activity types.

We are in the home stretch of the semester and all of these learning opportunities are contributing to the studio’s understanding of urban conditions. As we continue to program spaces for recycling activities, we will continue to innovate and research to design a vision study that creates a thriving recycling system in Downtown Kansas City!

 

The Trials and Tribulations of Composting

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During our explorations and research into the Kansas City waste system, we discovered composting. Kansas City doesn’t currently offer composting as a part of the waste disposal system. Missouri Organic has been the main stakeholder in the composting system in Kansas City and currently offers yard waste composting to residents for a small fee. They also offer food composting to businesses in the Kansas City area. While we learned that many residents have their yard waste picked up, food scrap composting is not accessible for most Kansas City residents. According to the EPA, more than half of all Municipal Solid Waste that ends up in landfills is made up of compostable materials. That means 44,000 tons of the waste sent to landfills in Kansas City last year could’ve been turned into compost to nourish the plants and trees planted around the city.

Common misconceptions about composting include that it is difficult, smells, and attracts pests; because we are trying to target multi-family and commercial buildings for more efficient recycling systems, we decided to take on the challenge and see how one would compost in a commercial setting. We got a worm composter and began to dispose of our food scraps in the trays to see how “difficult” composting could be. The composter is comprised of three trays and a lid to keep smells contained and the worms in. It also comes with instructions for set up as well as a booklet with information about which kinds of food can be composted. There is also a tap to collect the leachate (aka compost tea) which is the nutrient rich water that comes out of the compost; we'll be utilizing the leachate to water some of the plants we have here at the Kansas City Design Center.

The greatest challenge of composting has been trying to find the balance between moist and dry ingredients. Compost is created in layers of ingredients. The base layer is bare earth or mulch. That is then layered with moist ingredients, mainly food scraps, and dry ingredients like straw, leaves or even food stained paper and cardboard. The combination of the two materials keeps the compost from being too moist, which hinders the amount of oxygen available to the microorganisms, and too dry which slows down the composting process. Once the compost is established, it is then turned once a week or so in order to aerate the pile.

The KCDC composter has come with a few challenges but it is definitely not impossible. While it is certainly easier to throw food away, the repercussions on the environment are worth the extra effort. We hope this experience will help us better understand how to make recycling more convenient and exciting in Downtown Kansas City.

Inside the Ripple Glass Plant

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This week, the KCDC took a trip to our local glass recycling plant, Ripple Glass. We were eager to peak behind the scenes of those purple bins we all know so well and find out how exactly the bottles that we recycle everyday are turned into new product. The tour was graciously led by friend of KCDC and founder of Boulevard Brewing Company, John McDonald. John founded Ripple Glass in 2009 as a response to Kansas Citians throwing away some 150 million pounds of glass annually, 10 million of which were Boulevard bottles. Since then, Ripple Glass has transformed the way KC recycles: in just 6 years, Ripple Glass has converted KC’s glass recycling rate from just 3% to over 20%, and that’s only the beginning.

“We want to turn Kansas City into the number one glass recycling city in the country.”
— John McDonald

We waded through a fog of silicon dust, ascended service ladders, and ducked our heads underneath low hanging machinery as we followed the glass' journey from the bed of a Ripple Bin truck to its finally destination: back on the trucks and off to either the bottle-making plant in Oklahoma where Boulevard bottles are made, or to local fiberglass manufacturers who will spin the newly refined glass into insulation for houses right here in Kansas City. We also learned about how Ripple Glass is using recycled glass to make counter-tops and floor tiles so nothing goes unused. 

As we left the plant, covered in dust, we were filled with excitement. We can’t wait to utilize what we learned in our vision plan for a recycling system in Downtown Kansas City. Many thanks to John McDonald, and all the Ripple Glass employees, who took time out of their busy schedules to show us around.

Great Blog Post from Former KCDC Student

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Former KCDC student Christina Henning wrote an article for Gould Evans' blog (where she is currently an associate) about the KCDC's collaboration with 50/50. KCDC Director Vladimir Krstic would like to extend his congratulations to everyone involved in the project:

“Please take a note of this thoughtful article written by Christina Hennings, a KCDC alumna. We are both very happy for the success of the 50/50 gallery project by Hannah Lodwick and Cambria Potter which took tremendous amount of perseverance and hard work, and proud of our graduates, particularly Christina Hennings and Mary Rogers whose indispensable assistance on this project demonstrated in the best light the spirit of our program committed to community service, collaboration and making difference in improving urban realm. Our congratulations to all for their outstanding work and success. ”
— Vladimir Krstic

Hitting the Ground Running

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The KCDC is back for another year with 11 students from 3 disciplines, 2 awesome projects, and 1 new professor. This year, we'll be working on developing a recycling system for the downtown Kansas City area as well as a project with Art in the Loop.

We kicked off the new year with a class meeting to discuss this year's projects. The first project we'll be working on is a vision study for a recycling system in downtown Kansas City. Unlike residential areas of Kansas City, currently there is no municipal system for recycling in multi-family homes and commercial buildings in the downtown core. We’ll be working to figure out what the needs for recycling are in downtown Kansas City and what we can do to make it more accessible for the people that live, work, and visit the downtown area everyday.

The second project we’ll be working on is a vision plan for Art in the Loop sites in Downtown KC. Art in the Loop is an organization within the Downtown Council that supports artwork in the Central Business District as a part of its urban fabric and identity. We will be creating a system for placing art in downtown KC and studying arts integration into the urban environment.

We'd also like to take this opportunity to introduce the KCDC's newest professor, Dr. Jason Brody. Professor Brody is a planning and urban design professor from K-State. He’ll be teaching the Urban Design seminar at the KCDC as well as helping students on KCDC projects. Jason welcomed in the new academic year by throwing us a rooftop social in downtown KC.

As we move forward into our work, we've spent the first three weeks of the semester conducting research and preparing for our first presentation with the downtown recycling study advisory committee. Made up of area professionals working in the field of recycling and waste management, the advisory committee will help steer us in the right direction and address any questions we have throughout the project.

In the short time we've been conducting research, we've come to learn that the systems behind what we absentmindedly throw away everyday are far more complex than most of us realized. We are eager to sort through all this information and, ultimately, come up with an elegant solution for effectively recycling in downtown KC.

Stay tuned!