Source: The Republic

City Engineer Andrew Beckort opened bids Tuesday at the city’s board of works meeting for concrete work that’s part of a bus-pull off that will be located at NexusPark between its entrances along Herman Darlage Drive.

Beckort mentioned to board members that the city had been working with architecture students on a bus shelter as part of the project.

Lucas Brown, an architect and professor for the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program, said that school officials are looking for ways to be more involved in the community and began conversations with Columbus Transit, the board of public works, and Mayor Mary Ferdon’s office on ways to do so. After the program secured a $15,000 grant from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) last year, Heritage Fund and the city, among others, contributed additional funding to make the bus shelter project possible.

Last fall, two of the program’s classes helped lay the foundation for students who would put the bus shelter design together. One was a digital fabrication course where students that are actually involved in the design and construction of the shelter learning about steel and CNC tube bending, laser cutting and press-breaking.

“We visited a number of fabrication shops and steel distributors, and then we also partnered with Columbus Propeller,” Brown said, noting the makerspace’s relationship with the program. “They have a really great metal shop there, and so we did some work there last semester with that group.”

Another course students took was a stakeholder engagement class, working in conjunction with John Burnett at CivicLab. Following that, the group did a number of interviews and surveys, set up a booth at Ethnic Expo and talked through what a bus shelter in Columbus should be like.

“As you can imagine: design is a very important consideration in Columbus considering our heritage here,” Brown said. “But at the same time, function needed to be of primary concern. We needed to be thinking about design, but the design really had to follow the functional form that this needed to serve.”

There were a lot of discussions about safety, lighting and a variety of seating options, according to Brown.

“It’s basically a bent-plate steel project. It’s going to be bent-plate steel that’s perforated with glass with ceramic threading. There’s this pattern of dancing Cs that’s either perforated or fritted that follows the map of rivers that go through Columbus.”

Because of the bent-plate steel design, they were really able to economize material, Brown said.

“The work we’re doing here is really important in our goal of being more involved in the community through stakeholder engagement and these design-build exercises in the future,” Brown said. “Hopefully this is the first of what could be a long-line of our program becoming part of the fabric of Columbus as it relates to the social network, but also the design tradition and culture that we all share in this community.”

Second-year students involved in the design and construction include the following currently taking Z602 Architecture Design-Build Studio:

• Ana Gaither
• Ruviendel Isenia
• Israt Jahan
• Zane Johnson
• Negar Yaghoubpour
• Carolina Zapata

These are the six bids the city received for the concrete work:

• PAF Construction, LLC for $47,137
• CASE Construction for $75,135.74
• All Star Paving for $76,719.49
• Lawyer Excavation, Inc for $106,635.43
• King’s Trucking & Excavation for $108,300
• Milestone Contractors for $144,701