- Historical Elements of the Site

I'm Paul Bierman-Lytle. I'm an adjunct professor at the Dunwoody College of Technology located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The third year students, architecture students, designed an enclosure for our famous dandelion fountain located in Loring Park which is the central park of downtown Minneapolis. And the models behind me and next to me show the scale model of the entire park, as well as some of the enclosure models by the students. I think one of the things that is interesting about this particular park is that it does have historic merit, it's a historic landmark that's on the national registry of historic places.

So there's a lot of historic buildings around that surround this park and there's a lot of new features. For example, across the street is the Walker Art Center, just down here which is a modern building and across the park is also the sculpture garden. So you'll see a lot of famous sculptures across the park there. So historically, it's really, really important. So this is a real challenge for us to come up with a design that not only compliments the historic character of the park, but also inspires and demonstrates innovation. I think one of the biggest challenges that the park currently has is its limited parking.

There's no major parking lots around the area. There's no mass transit to get people here. We've identified around the park different places where there's bus stops right now. So that's gonna be the big challenge is to make this park really, really accessible to a lot of people, to enjoy what we're gonna be presenting to them. The plans are right now is to first of all, evaluate can we share parking with some of neighboring facilities like the Walker Art Center parking? Can we share those facilities? Can we share them with Dunwoody College parking lot?

The other option, which you've probably seen at some theme parks or some other type of entertainment areas is there's off site parking and then you bring the customers or the guests to your site through vans or golf cart type of trains. So these are some of the options we're looking at but obviously we can't just put all this here and there's gonna be traffic jams because there just hasn't been any concern or resolution of how we're gonna deal with the cars. I've given the students a couple of challenges. One is to design a pedestrian bridge.

There's a pedestrian bridge located right here and that does add some historical relevance to it in terms of its cast iron construction. It's got the logo of the park, which is over there. It's kind of a four leaf clover type of design. So yeah, the students have always included, they do have references of relevance to the historical nature, but I also want them to be inspired to present something new and innovated. Now the enclosure of the dandelion fountain itself, we haven't actually gotten into some of the conceptual designs. But again, I suspect that there'll be some historical reference in terms of materials.

Mostly, in terms of the old cast iron. One of the students actually put in a water wheel in the bridge. These two ponds, as maybe you'll see, when we film there, is that they're actually in bad decay. There's a lot of algae growth in them, so they need some way to rejuvenate the ponds. So a water wheel or fountains in the pond will actually bring more oxygen in. So that water wheel concept was not only historical in nature, and it goes back to some of the water wheel, the mills that were in Minnesota, but also helps rejuvenates these two ponds, aerates them.

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