Within the next nine months or so there is likely to be a new restroom facility and picnic pavilion at King’s Gate Park — and the design team will be four students from Aledo High School’s architecture program.
Those four students — junior Faith Bartlett, senior Samuel Ghent, and juniors Amelia Buck and Matthew Dominich showed a model of their plan and provided details at the April 22 meeting of the Willow Park City Council.
Bartlett, designer and modeler, is a third-year architecture student, and she began the presentation. She said her role was to help find design inspiration and to build the model.
Dominick, a third-year architecture student, spoke next.
“My main role in this project was supporting costs, design elements, and developing ideas to the smallest details,” Dominick said. “I also provided help constructing the model. I’m so proud to be a part of this wonderful city of Willow Park, having the opportunity to have real-world experience that paves the pathway for the future, and having an amazing team — these four people are amazing.”
Buck, also a third-year student, said “this has been such an amazing experience, getting to work on the design process from start to finish with this whole team, and it gives a nice sneak peek at what industry and college architecture might look like.”
Ghent is already planning to study architecture at Texas Tech. He designed the AutoCAD file and worked on the digital model.
“This project was a lot of help to help jump start my my college career,” Ghent said.
The students in turn walked through the design with the council. They said they looked at other structures in the area to come up with a design that would fit in with existing architecture.
“We went into this project looking for ideas to create a bathroom in the pavilion that was ADA compliant and accessible to everyone, serving balanced needs of park guests, with some aesthetically pleasing features that served to add on to the enjoyability of the park itself, we searched for ways to incorporate aesthetics and functionality, looking to provide space that can be used for events such as picnics, birthday parties, or even just a little get-together while children play at the park,” Bartlett said.
“We noticed this very prominent blue white and kind of silvery gray color theme,” Buck said. “To keep with that theme, we picked out two specific colors to set a baseline for the kind of tones we were thinking would look well. We picked celestial blue and commercial white and bringing forth the blue through the roof and the trim we give our bathroom and pavilion more of a personality and character, while keeping it in harmony with the rest of the park, especially the play set.”
One design element was a mural on one side of the structure.
“The mural will hopefully be designed and painted by an art student at Aledo High School. This was a really important aspect to our design, because it added a lot more detail, a lot more color, a lot more personality to our building, which we thought it was lacking,” Ghent said. “It also allowed us to incorporate more of our community, which is a really big aspect of our project.”
The genesis
Tim Rogers, Career and Technical Education (CTE) Coordinator at Aledo High School, told The Community News that the project was borne out of a field trip.
“I took the students to a field trip — my Architect II students — to go visit Randy Law, the code enforcement guy at the city and he did a presentation to them about code compliance, like what’s the process if I want to build a house in Willow Park, Rogers said. “We talked about building costs and all that he said, ‘yeah we may try to get a bathroom pavilion’ and I said, ‘well what if we designed it for you.’
They took the idea to Mandy McCarley, director of Parks and Recreation for the city.
Rogers offered to provide ADA-compliant AutoCAD drawings and Revit design (a process of creating, editing, and reviewing 3D models of buildings and infrastructure using AutoDesk Revit).
McCarley provided a list of what was needed by law and what the city wanted in the structure.
“Then I just I just let the kids go on their own. They kind of sequestered for about six weeks up in the library,” Rogers said. “They worked every day by themselves and they did it — I mean, they knocked it out the park — it was amazing.”
Rogers said the Aledo High School architecture program is in its second year, and by next year there will be students who will be doing practicums at architecture firms.
He said his group is already working on another project — an ADA-compliant wheelchair bridge for Cross Timbers Park.
“Our engineering students are going to do a fabrication build up and do a stress test on it and then we’re going to come back with materials so we’re going to have two different groups working on the bridge. If the (City of Willow Park) decide they like it then they can use it. If not, it’s just a good project for students to do for the resume for sure.
Construction plans
Willow Park City Manager Bryan Grimes said that it is not only possible, but likely that the students’ work will be used.
“We do have a civil engineer on staff, Gretchen Vasquez, so if anything needed to be stamped or signed or reviewed, we do have that internal that we can use,” Grimes said. “For the kids, I guess it would probably give them a starting portfolio for if they decided to do this in college.
“I really did like the design, and I like what the students produced.”
Other business
In other business, the council:
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here