When construction begins at Gateway Park in Bryan later this month, the plans will reflect designs made by first-year landscape architecture students led by Jodi Naderi, assistant professor of landscape architecture at Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture.
Members of the Bryan City Council asked the students to consider the park a blank slate and then begin the design process. The park site is located along Main Street between 28th and 29th streets in downtown Bryan.
Naderi said the piece of land presented a design challenge for the students.
“Somehow, this site had to have this sort of chameleon-like dimension because in one way it’s just a local park that’s going to be used by people for lunch breaks and playing around on a Sunday,” she said. “And on the other hand, the park is part of the thousands and thousands of people associated with Texas Reds.”
Texas Reds is an annual two-day downtown event celebrating history of the beef and wine industries in the Brazos Valley. The park site, where the Texas Reds stage is constructed, is the focal point of this event
“It was the first time the students dealt with the medium of landscape as an art, applying the dynamics of climate, trees, civic space, people and all these things into one place,” she said. “I think their designs were fabulous.”
Nikki Martin, assistant to Bryan’s director of public works, said that Mark Ferguson, a landscape architect with CLM Construction, made a final design after reviewing the students’ plans. Ferguson received a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture degree from Texas A&M in 1970.
On April 8, the Bryan City Council accepted a $246,000 bid from Dudley Construction of College Station for the project.
“The idea,” said Naderi, “was to create a park that celebrated Bryan’s past, and set a tone for the ascetics of what you might anticipate as you enter the Bryan of the future.”
Some of the ideas, she said, were quite imaginative.
Underneath the park, the city is building a large tank to hold storm water for a gradual release into discharge streams. “This site is a cover to that storm water holding system, so one could think of it as a roof garden,” said Naderi.
“One of the students proposed a giant spigot as an art sculpture, and given what was going on underneath the park, he actually considered the notion the water might recycle through it, demonstrating a green process in a whimsical way.”
The Gateway Park project is just the latest example of landscape architecture students’ community involvement in the Bryan/College station area.
“We do work for communities and municipalities in need,” said Naderi. “If a city is trying to create a design for raising funds, so we can help. It’s a great community effort, and of course, it forges all kinds of stronger relationships with the university and its surrounding community.
It’s also a great learning experience for students, said Naderi.
“They get to learn how municipal agencies function together, the kinds of information available to help them create designs and they how to make formal presentations,” she said. “The students find out what they’re made of when they work in a team.”
