AIAS Presents Community Service Award

The Kansas State University chapter of the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) has presented Lee Skabelund with its 2009 Community Service Award.

AIAS president and fourth-year architecture student Samantha Smith announced the award at Architecture Evening held in mid-September.

Skabelund is a Manhattan resident and an assistant professor in K-State’s Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning. He was the project coordinator, co-designer and photographer for the K-State International Student Center Rain-Garden, whose purpose is to educate students, faculty, staff, administrators and campus visitors about low-impact stormwater management solutions by revealing how designed landscapes can elegantly capture and use rooftop and surface water runoff. The project was recently recognized with an Honor Award in the Community Service category of the 2009 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) National Student Design Competition.

Manhattan’s Sunset Zoo also has a new, successful rain-garden thanks to the efforts of Skabelund and his students. The installation has stopped sediment from an eroding hillside from turning an adjacent sidewalk into a mud slick every time it rains. Native prairie plants are surviving in formerly compacted soil and weedy turf. Team members with the national zoo accreditation body noted the installation as a very important and helpful addition to the zoo when they visited this past summer.

With assistant professor of architecture Todd Gabbard, architecture students Mark Neibling and Michael Knapp, and biological and agricultural engineering faculty and students, Skabelund is also the designer and creator of a 15 foot by 20 foot experimental “green” roof installed over a third-floor breezeway in the west wing of K-State’s Seaton Hall. Monitoring equipment assesses how such a roof can reduce the urban heat load and control runoff from the region’s intense thunderstorms. The design mixes 14 grasses and forbs native to Kansas inside a border of sedum, a shallow-rooted succulent, in 3-7 inches of growing medium. As far as we know, this is the first such construction in the Flint Hills of Kansas since early settlers lived in sod houses.

K-State’s AIAS membership is composed of students studying in the College of Architecture, Planning and Design at K-State. According to Smith, nominations of persons who demonstrate dedication to the community and to students were solicited from AIAS offices and members. The nominations were then researched and discussed by the AIAS officers.

“Lee Skabelund is a deserving recipient of this award,” Smith said. “Using design, he has had made a significant and positive difference in the quality of the built environment on the K-State campus and in Manhattan. He is teaching students about sustainable practices in the classroom and showing students how those ideas can be implemented in our own designs, as well as our own homes and gardens,” Smith said.

For more information, contact:
Samantha Smith, samcs@ksu.edu
Diane Potts, 785.532.1090