Last week, we held our second public meeting for the Kessler Park water reservoir vision study and were thrilled to have Abby Hoover with the Northeast News cover the meeting. You can check out here write up here. You can also view the livestream of the meeting on youtube and answer our questionnaire to help guide the project!
A little over a month has passed since we started studying the reservoir and we have some updates!
For the past couple of weeks we have been working hard towards our very first upcoming project review. As we continue pushing our research and our findings, we have also started incorporating a couple of potential concepts for both the reservoir and the direct site around it. While the concepts are still in their preliminary stages, we are excited to present them to different professionals from around the area and get their feedback on how to move forward. Before this however, we have been critiquing ourselves as a studio to make sure we present our work in its best quality.
A lot of the concepts that we have developed revolve around the ‘rooms’ that directly surround the reservoir. As seen in the diagram below, these outdoor rooms are defined by the designed existing streets, topographical conditions, and the foliage that surrounds them. These rooms also define the different activities that are ongoing in the reservoir, like disc golf. We have identified these rooms as being the root of our proposals, since we can begin to identify potential paths that unite them, as well as potential concepts that are driven by the lack of connection between these rooms and the reservoir.
A few other concepts focus on the reservoir’s historical symmetry and present asymmetry. As we studied the reservoir’s geometry and proportions from historical plans to present conditions, we identified the two basins of the reservoir to be originally designed as a symmetrical pair, but the nature of its morphology to the present has created an asymmetrical environment due to the cracks and decay in the materials. This shift in condition throughout history is an important aspect of the reservoir, which is why our concepts aim to highlight through a contrasting axis.
We continue to work hard to further develop these preliminary concepts and hope to gain applicable feedback from our peers, colleagues and, most importantly, the community!
Wow, we have been busy!
Since our last post we had our first advisory on meeting Wednesday September 15. A huge thank you to everyone who took time out of their day to join us, virtually, while we presented our findings! Our advisory board is made up of individuals from the neighborhoods surrounding Kessler Park, KCMO Parks and Rec, The Kansas City Museum, and many professionals in the Kansas City area. This group helps guide the direction of the project and make sure we are addressing the critical needs of the community. We can’t thank them enough for their feedback!
We also participated in Park(ing) Day on Saturday September 18! As a studio we put our heads together to re-imagine what a normal parking spot could be transformed into. On top of that we were able to reuse things we had around the studio to create a fun parklet which gave us the perfect opportunity to introduce attendees to the Kessler Park Vision Study project. Thanks to Park(ing) Day we were able to gather so much great feedback about what people want to see in Kessler Park.
Finally, we hosted our first public meeting on Wednesday September 22. A huge thank you to all who joined! With that meeting we were able to meet numerous members of the community and gather feedback on what they would like to see happen with the reservoir and the challenges and opportunities they notice as residents.
Moving forward we will be taking the feedback we received from our Advisory group and the public to improve our research and keep developing our work. Depicted below is just one of the many maps we have been developing. This map shows amenities in the surrounding areas such as food, retail, education and more as well a walking radius from the reservoir in order to help us see what is available to park users currently and what amenities are lacking in the area.
The public meeting live stream is available to watch on our Facebook page: https://fb.watch/8dJZjAx8yT/ Our next public meeting will take place on Wednesday, November 3rd and we will use a hybrid format, holding the meeting at PH Coffee but retaining a virtual component for those that might not be able to attend in person.
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