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

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!

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!