A New Semester at KCDC

It’s a new year and KCDC is back and ready to get the ball rolling again on our projects. We had a very successful Open House and Professional Review in December and we appreciate all the helpful feedback we received. We’ll be reviewing all the notes we got as we get back in the groove of our recycling program this semester.

(More pictures of the event are available on our Facebook page!)

This semester started off with the students participating in the ULI Hines Student Competition. The Competition is an intensive 15-day urban design and development challenge for graduate students. The challenge is to design a comprehensive development for a large-scale site. This year, the site was located in Midtown Atlanta. This year, we had 3 teams competing out of KCDC and 1 team competing out of KU. You can see our work exhibited Thursday Dec, 4th at a reception we’ll be holding in honor of the competition.

We also have a new studio joining us this semester from KU. Shannon Criss’ Dotte Agency studio will be running out of the KCDC studio while they work on a project in Kansas City, Kansas. Along with a new studio, there are three new fourth year students from K-State joining the program. Lindsay Stucki a Landscape Architecture student, Levi Caraway an Architecture student, and David Maynard from the Planning program.

So, stay tuned as we continue with our projects this semester and I hope you’re all excited to see where things go because we definitely are!

National Endowment for the Arts Awards More Than $27.6 Million Across Nation - Includes $10,000 awarded to the Kansas City Design Center

In its first 50 years, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) awarded more than $5 billion in grants to recipients in every state and U.S. jurisdiction, the only arts funder in the nation to do so. Today, the NEA announced awards totaling more than $27.6 million in its first funding round for fiscal year 2016, including a Challenge America award of $10,000 to the Kansas City Design Center.

The Challenge America category supports projects that extend the reach of the arts to underserved populations whose opportunities to experience the arts are limited by geography, ethnicity, economics, or disability. Challenge America grants are comparatively small investments that have a big impact in their communities. NEA Chairman Jane Chu said, “The arts are part of our everyday lives – no matter who you are or where you live – they have the power to transform individuals, spark economic vibrancy in communities, and transcend the boundaries across diverse sectors of society. Supporting projects like the one from the Kansas City Design Center offers more opportunities to engage in the arts every day.”

“We are thrilled with receipt of this award because it speaks to the importance of this project and the relevance of our collaborative efforts to improve the livability of the Greater Downtown Kansas City Area.” - KCDC Director Vladimir Krstic

This award will support the KCDC Art in the Loop Vision Plan, a comprehensive study for the development of Art in the Loop installation sites. The primary goal of the Art in the Loop Foundation is to activate existing and found public spaces in the Downtown Kansas City Loop through physical, artistic, and programmatic insertions that engage people and improve the walkability, authenticity, safety, connectivity and uniqueness of the area. These programs/projects may be temporary or permanent and can be implemented in a multi-phased approach in a manner to best expedite their implementation. The purpose of this vision plan will be to assess the viability of all potential sites, develop criteria for their selection, make account of all relevant contextual factors that need to be taken into consideration when making the sites available to artists, and provide a reference for artists’ concept development.

This project will be executed in spring 2016 by the KCDC Urban Design Studio, in collaboration with two competitively selected local artists who will serve as consultants. Art in the Loop has issued a Call for Artists for this project; interested parties should respond by December 15th: http://www.downtownkc.org/2015/12/02/kcdc-call-for-artists/

For more information on Art in the Loop, visit www.artintheloop.com

The Final Countdown

We hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! While everyone was enjoying the time off, recycling and our project was still on our minds. One student, at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Washington DC, documented recycling practices at a large event. Events are an important part of the waste stream due to the large amount of recyclable waste generated. Therefore, they’ve become a part of the overall system we are designing for. At the Walter E. Washington Convention Center, color coded recycling and organics collection leads recycling initiatives in partnership with PepsiCo. The containers even come with instructions on what can be collected in each bin.

And while Black Friday might not be thought of as an event in a typical sense, Target was ready for the large amount of waste generated on such large shopping days. They were ready to take on the increased waste loads as well!

The most important part of the recycling vision study is recycling in the public realm. On the main outdoor pedestrian shopping corridor in Boulder, recycling bins are visible at every block to capture waste and compost as people move from shop to shop. Through our studies of Kansas City, we have inventoried the waste disposal currently available in Downtown Kansas City. We’ve also analyzed recycling and compost that could be captured in the public realm currently and there is a disparity between the two. While our project’s goal isn’t simply to increase the number of recycling bins on streets, we continue to look to other cities with strong recycling systems to learn from as we wrap up the programming for the project.

With the end of Thanksgiving break, that means there are only 3 weeks left in the semester. With that comes our final professional reviews and open house. We are also preparing a programming document to showcase our research, analysis and our proposals for a recycling system in Downtown Kansas City. We met with our advisory group one last time before we left to get some feedback and advice on the work that we’ve done so far and where we plan on going with it.

We began the semester by splitting into three groups: Best Practices, Regional System, Downtown KC Needs. We then took all our research and findings and drew conclusions from them. That way, we can begin to figure out where Kansas City’s system is not working and figure out how we can help and how design can be an integral part of that system. Some of the most interesting findings led us to programming efforts that we couldn’t have foreseen at the beginning. For example, compostable materials account for almost 40% of the waste stream. From our case studies, we found that policy is very important in how impactful a recycling program can be. We also began to understand how little data is available about current recycling practices in Kansas City. Those findings have become key for our explorations into various aspects of recycling, as a whole, for downtown Kansas City.

Due to our discovery of composting loads, we decided to analyze organic materials separately in order to understand the opportunities it presents. The overlay of the composting system with the temporal and permanent creates the network of opportunity spaces that will become the sites for more design exploration next semester!

Stay tuned for more information on our open house in the coming weeks and our programming document which is due out in January!

AIA DESIGN EXCELLENCE AWARD

Last week, KCDC received the AIA Kansas City Design Excellence Concept Merit Award! The project is a vision study for the redevelopment of Kessler Park and the conceptual design proposal for the repurposing of the abandoned water reservoir. A very special thank you to the 2014-15 studio that worked on this great project: Aaron Bisch, Derek Hueffmeier, Noah Volz, Owen Cobb, Dominique Roberson, Lindsey Brockhouse, Megan Hoehensinner, Rachel Kelsey, Robyn Tank, and Yihong Yan.

The purpose of the vision study was to reintegrate the Kessler Park into its larger urban context; and enhance its internal ordering, experiential cohesion and programming capitalizing on original Kessler’s ideas, inherent natural amenities and the strategic adaptation of the transformative change that time has imposed on the park and its context. 

The conceptual design proposal examines the possibility of integrating the reservoir into inhabitable public space of the park by proposing an incisive interpolation of a bridge structure – ‘ a living link.’ It serves as a critical activating element which operates as a series of programmatic pods that interact with the reservoir space allowing for different functions to take place while preserving its existing ‘found’ condition.

Congratulations are also in order to our collaborators at KU Architecture who won the Honor Award in the Concept Category for MoCOLAB!

Innovation and Research for a Better KC

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!