Awards

West Bottoms Reborn: A Vision Study for a System of Public Spaces

The purpose of the project was to generate an urban design vision and implementation strategy for the creation of a system of public spaces in the West Bottoms area of Kansas City. The interdisciplinary design team included three select artists, and city and community representatives. The design approach was based on the development of the “place-keeping” concept as an operational strategy for discriminating, capturing, extolling, and nurturing unique qualities of the extant urban environment and using them as a framework for staking potential public space and integrating artistic production into its creation and enactment. Each public space design was based on different contextual and programmatic paradigms while drawing on the same conceptual premise of ‘place keeping’ grounded in the found qualities of the individual locations. The design intent was to counter normative thinking and consider public space as a ‘working infrastructure’ based on environmental and experiential performance criteria.

 

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