Downtown Waco Urban ParkletDesign I Studio (Fall 2014)

Featured in The Waco Tribune, Baylor Lariat, and KWTX News 10*1st Place: American Society of Interior Designers TX Student Design Competition (Collaborative Design)

This project challenged interior design students to design and construct an urban parklet that met the unique needs and requirements of the downtown Waco community. Students conducted research, studied urban patterns, worked within a budget, and built their design. The parklet remained a fixture on Austin Avenue for six months, garnering praise from city leaders and local residents.

Urban ‘parklet’ designed by Baylor students to be installed on Austin Ave.By REGINA DENNIS rdennis@wacotrib.com | Posted: Tuesday, October 7, 2014 5:01 pm

A sleek new urban park designed by Baylor University students will be unveiled in downtown Waco to try to draw support for pre-game tailgating activities.

Dubbed a “parklet,” the 35-foot-long structure will be installed Wednesday in the 500 block of Austin Avenue, the culmination of six weeks of research, planning and construction by 15 junior interior design students at Baylor.

It features tables and benches made from recycled wooden pallets, planters filled with gold rush lantana flowers, and columns of square metal boxes called gabions that are filled with rocks to stabilize the structure.

A Waco “W” formed out of the wooden pallets is painted in the same hue of blue as a rooftop mural at Dichotomy Coffee & Spirits, which faces the structure from across Austin Avenue.

“The design is little bit more modern, with recycled materials,” said Carla Almeida, one of the design students who worked on the project. “It’s interesting because we kept the architecture around (the area) . . . and I think it will attract because it’s different. It’s something that matched with the place, but at the same time it’s new.”

Interior design professor Elise King came up with the parklet project as a hands-on assignment for her junior residential design class. While visiting Dichotomy this summer, she overheard Waco Downtown Development Corp. Executive Director Megan Henderson discussing football gameday plans and suggested a collaboration to help attract people to downtown.

King said parklets have become a trend in urban planning the past two years as a way to create a visually appealing and low-maintenance gathering space in areas of dense development.

‘Gathering space’

Baylor University interior design students

Amanda Friemel, Emily Winters and Kristina Scott sand panels made from wooden panels that will be used in a downtown parklett their class is building.

The parklett will be installed on the 500 block of Austin Avenue and is meant to draw traffic to pre-game tailgating activities.

“We were looking for something that would be a good gathering space for downtown, and the area where it’s located there’s a lot of asphalt — parking lot, sidewalk, street — so there’s a lot of concrete surrounding it,” King said. “We wanted something that would soften it, and we thought (a parklet) would then draw people to that space.”

Henderson said several downtown planning groups have noted the importance of boosting the walkability of the area, including the Imagine Waco plan and newly released recommendations from the Texas Main Street program.

“Because we have a car and vehicle orientation now, there’s a lot of surface parking, and that feels like just blank space from a pedestrian standpoint,” she said. “For a pedestrian, because there are not those connecting storefronts with outward-facing uses like retail or restaurants that’s engaging to the eye, those blank spaces feel kind of disorienting and make you feel disconnected in one part of downtown from another.”

Henderson said she hopes the parklet will entice some of the 5,000 residents who convene in that area and ride shuttle buses to McLane Stadium to linger in the area after the game.

She said for the two home games this season, most people have gone straight to the stadium to explore the new facility and gone home immediately after the game because of the evening kickoff times, while the upcoming matchup against Texas Christian University starts at 2:30 p.m.

The parklet is to remain up through gameday festivities this weekend and then will be evaluated by the city’s engineering department to determine whether the structure is stable enough to become a semipermanent installation.

Henderson said the city’s Public Improvement District will review the project a year from now to gauge whether it should remain in that spot or be moved to another location downtown.

Ideally, the parklet would help draw people to different parts of downtown, such as Heritage Square two blocks over and the Brazos River just beyond city hall and the Waco Convention Center.

Connecting downtown

“What we need is some more . . . bread crumbs to get people connected from node to node to node so they have an experience of downtown that has all these things, rather than an experience that is a couple blocks here and maybe a block or two over there,” Henderson said.

Each of King’s students created a design concept, and the class eventually combined the top three designs into one plan that best utilized the space and incorporated city branding.

Chelsea Millan said the blue “W” on the back wall of the parklet will help visually link the area to the rest of downtown, for example.

Kristina Scott said the final design aims to attract different demographics to downtown, including

families in search of a play area for children, college students taking a break from their studies and downtown workers needing fresh air from the office.“We didn’t want to focus on just one group, we wanted to make sure it catered to everybody’s needs,” Scott said. “We all felt like that was something that would make the design successful.”

For most of the students, the parklet was their first attempt at construction. They built the structure from scratch, spending the past two weekends, class hours and free time during the week sawing, sanding, hammering and cutting materials to fulfill the design concept.

“Doing it ourselves, it’s really made us think about what’s feasible and what’s not, because you can have a really great design, but if you can’t make it, it’s not a great design,” Grace Tabuena said. “It’s teaching us to think of how things are actually going to work and not just putting together a design that looks good on paper.”

Mary Catherine Edwards said she views the project not only as a learning opportunity but also a way of serving the Waco community and becoming more connected with the development happening downtown.

“To really be a part of the city that way, that’s one thing for college kids — it’s harder to incorporate yourself into the city you’re living in,” Edwards said. “It’s easy for us to get involved at Baylor and to love Baylor and its campus, but it is not as common for us to be able to find a place within the city of Waco for us to really insert ourselves and to own it as our city, too.”