Proposed Spot Parks are Right on Target

Reprinted Courtesy of Kansas City Star.

When Kimberly Kolkovich searched for a project in her last months of architectural school, she stepped outside the Kansas City Design Center, looked around and wondered, what if …?

What if you could replace a single curbside parking spot with a micropark, a little bit of urban respite?

By the time she finished wondering, Kolkovich had designed three such prototype parks for specific locations downtown. She called them Spot Parks, and the speculative proposal earned the recent Kansas State University graduate a Monsters of Design award in the annual competition sponsored by the Young Architects Forum here.

Kolkovich, whose specialty is interiors, turned the idea of public space as an outdoor room into something quite tangible, both responsive to the city and environmentally conscious.

“The sites I picked because they are enjoyable places to inhabit,” Kolkovich said by phone from Chesterfield, Mo., where she is now interning at an architectural firm. “They have a really good community surrounding them — people living around there and walking dogs.”

Her proposal PowerPoint began with this inspiration from the architect Louis Kahn: “A street is a room by agreement … a community room dedicated to the city for common use … its ceiling is the sky.”

The proposed parks — on Baltimore, Central and Ninth streets — responded to their respective views as well as sun and wind conditions. Kolkovich arrayed seating, planters, sheltering screens and even solar-powered lighting into simple, elegant and inviting spaces. She envisions the parks being built with recycled wood, aluminum, pervious paving and other sustainably oriented and reasonably priced features.

A couple of them contain “bioretention cells,” or sections that capture street runoff and operate as miniature rain gardens.

The three designs could be replicated at similarly oriented sites.

As part of the K-State architecture program, Kolkovich spent her last year with other students in the Kansas City Design Center’s studio at 1018 Baltimore Ave.

Much of the year involved group projects; at the end she was on her own.

“I was the only interior architect in that program,” Kolkovich said, “so I made my own rules.”

The program year emphasized improving downtown’s north loop, an area largely defined by a sea of surface parking lots. So she stayed focused on that.

She started by thinking about street furniture, but the challenge wasn’t big enough, and she did research on storm water.

Then she realized that she had license to go wild.

“As a student it’s one of the last few times you can go out of the box,” she said, “so I decided to go crazy to propose these parks that overtook parking spots.”

“I thought it was a great idea,” said Richard Farnan, Design Center lecturer.

Although she was unaware of it at the start, Kolkovich’s idea is a permanent approach to the spirit promoted by “Parking Day,” an international movement to reclaim parking spots by way of temporary street theater. That day was Friday, and last week Farnan and his current crop of students planned to join the movement and take over a parking place outside the Design Center.

As a gesture, Kolkovich’s more formal and permanent parking-conversion project speaks to the desire for places that favor pedestrian activity.

But is such a quiet, forward-looking thing likely to happen in a car-happy place like Kansas City?

“I think her plans were very realistic,” said Vincent Gauthier, executive director of the Port Authority of Kansas City and adjunct lecturer in architecture and urban planning at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Gauthier saw Kolkovich’s plan during project reviews at the Design Center last spring. “I think the implementation is going to take some creativity and effort on different people’s behalf. But the approach she took makes sense for the type of environment we’re trying to create downtown.”

So here’s hoping someone can find a way to turn Kolkovich’s vision into reality.