Prairie Park Pavilion
Prairie Park Pavilion
Prairie Park Pavilion
Prairie Park Pavilion
Built almost entirely for materials destined for the waste stream, this recent addition to the Prairie Park Nature Center in Lawrence, Kansas, is as boldly sustainable as it is visually striking. Its structural logic borrows from the branching forms of the surrounding prairie and woodland. Retired utility poles, donated by local power company Evergy, bifurcate into Y-shaped columns that vault overhead to support longitudinal beams, creating an unobstructed gathering space beneath.
Secondary framing members — milled from additional reclaimed poles — form a field of triangulated cells across the roof plane, their geometry rationalized through parametric scripting to accommodate the most commonly available donated sign dimensions. More than 1,200 decommissioned aluminum road signs collected from regional municipalities within a 50-mile radius were catalogued, cut, edge-finished and sandblasted to form the canopy — a luminous, matte surface that casts shifting organic shadows across the seating below.
A hands-on design-build project that realized infrastructure the Prairie Park Nature Center could not have otherwise afforded, the project was conceived and constructed by third-year architecture students at the University of Kansas. That same school provided the limestone boulders that form the pavilion’s seating; they previously served as security bollards at the university’s football stadium. Two were split using the traditional plug-and-feather technique to create integrated ADA-accessible zones — accessibility treated here as a design problem rather than a compliance exercise. In total, roughly 95 per cent of the pavilion is constructed from repurposed materials.
As with many great projects, the constraints of the site context fuelled the imaginative structure: The pavilion needed to withstand seasonal controlled prairie burns, so the river gravel ground cover, limestone seating and heavy timber columns were in fact originally selected for their resilience to brief, intense heat. The Prairie Park Pavilion is designed to survive these cycles and coexist with them — to be, in its own way, native to the landscape it serves.
Team: Wynn Bowden, Paige Butterfield, Naalkh DeAsis, Ashley Decker, Emily Dulle, Matthew Garrett, Emma Hamer, Sara Miranda Luzio, Christopher Monarres, Sarah Montes, Madison Simons, Alayna Thomas, Melia Whitney; City of Lawrence Parks, Recreation and Culture; KBS Constructors; McClure Engineering; AZZ Galvanizing; Advanced Tree Service; Coal Creek Timber; Adam Moser; Evergy Energy Green Team; P1 Construction; HME; Masters Media Blasting; Cottin’s Hardware and Rental; Karl Ramberg; Melanie King; Whitney Juneau; Ben Brown; TJ Tangpuz; Suzan Hampton; Douglas County; City of Lawrence Traffic Engineering; Hicks Classic Concrete; Native Lands Restoration Collaborative School University of Kansas (Instructor: Keith Van de Riet)
