interior design office jeddah
the downtown lexington transit center offersnew interactive kid-friendly design thanks to a recent play everywhere challenge grant. lexington designers, including universityof kentucky college of design students, the lexington downtown development authority,lextran and lexpark worked together to bring play into everyday life. hannah o'leary:â the lexington downtown developmentauthority works on economic development and public space projects within downtown lexington.the intention of the play everywhere challenge was to provide play for children who don'tnecessarily have that in their everyday life. and the kaboom play everywhere challenge actuallycalled out bus stops, laundromats, empty lots.
places where children were in their everydaylife. we know from the lextran ridership survey, that people spend up to an hour sometimesgetting to and from their locations in lexington. and we just wanted to make the 10- to 15-minutewait for those families a little bit safer, and nicer, and fun.â when we knew we werea good candidate to receive the play everywhere challenge grant, we reached out to severaldesign teams to ask them to participate. jason scroggin: myself representing universityof kentucky, and a couple of other design firms, nomi design here in lexington, andinformal office, also here in lexington.â and each of us were to contribute a design proposalfor the bus terminal. and they wanted it to center on interactivity and play.
hannah o'leary: we have a strong relationshipwith the college of design. we've gotten a lot of interns through that program over timethat have greatly benefitted our organization. and we knew it was going to take a lot ofcreativity to come up with kid-friendly design in the challenging parameters of that space.up to 5000 people pass through that space every day. jason scroggin:â you have less than 20 feetwide to work with, and a lot of that is used for circulation. typically, in the coursethat i teach, we'll make large scale objects for people to really interact with, jump on,go inside, climb on, etc. that's kind of where we started with our design proposals, butwe found out relativelyâ quickly that that wouldn't work because, besides the fact thatthese pieces wouldn't fit inside the space,
that they would be hazardous. hannah o'leary:â we had, you know, the riskmanagement director from lextran there, and we had the facilities people who own the buildingfrom lexpark there, and talk to them about, you know, the risks of children falling offof things with the concrete platform and what could and could not happen with the wallsand the ceiling of the space. but the benefit of having the students there were they werereally able to think outside the box and think in a new way about the project. and comingand presenting a lot of really great ideas that we weren't able to do within the timeand scope of the grant, helped those key stakeholders see the potential for the space down the road.
jason scroggin: for me, that's probably whatmade it unique, was just the interaction. it wasn't like the students did the work andi would present it, you know, it was really that students presented, and they would sitat the table having the conversation with all of the constituents in the project. so,the way it's situated, there's the bus terminal on one side of this 500-foot-long space, andon the other side, it's all parking garage. and the glass block wall divides the two spaces.and, what's really nice about that wall, is that it lets light into the parking garage,so it's actually fairly spectacular on the inside of the parking garage. and on the outside,it's nice, but we also looked at that as an opportunity to, you know, light somethingup.
pooya mohaghegh:â in the beginning, we allpitched up ideas to decide which one is better. and then one of the ideas that got pickedup was the led installation. and i was one of the more experienced students with theinstallation of that type, so i kind of picked up working on that and figuring out what weneed, who need to talk to, and what we need to get. tricia rowedder:â i think the most challengingpart of the project was getting all the different components to work together. because we knewwhat we wanted to do and what we were trying to accomplish, but learning and tag-teamingdifferent programs and different equipment pooya mohaghegh:â we ended up spending a lotof times, late at night, from maybe midnight to three/four am, preparing the boards, solderingthem, programming it, testing it. if you have
an idea on campus, there's someone who knowshow to help you do it. so, we didn't know a lot of the things, but we went to the differentdepartments of engineering, and they did know how to do it, so we got help from them. socollaboration was very, very important in this project. tricia rowedder:â my favorite part i thinkis the outcome. actually getting to go down onto the site and interact with the lights.every time we go down, we see our stick figures reflecting on the wall and it's a lot of fun,because it is a project for all ages. whether you're a little kid or a grown adult. tricia rowedder:â with this project and withother projects i've done, it really opens up and shows you that architecture has somany different opportunities, and different
paths that you can go down. so, i think thisproject in general just helped me to learn a lot about the different variations thatare out there. and then, will help me decide what kind of architect i want to be.