JARBOE PARK POOL . CYCLE 4
site: Westside: Kansas City, Missouri
collaboration: Brent Forget

program description:
Swimming Pool Complex . Market Stalls . Community Garden . Observation

“No one knows the path to utopia. Aesthetics might make a city more interesting, and more exciting for the eyeballs and mind, but they won’t save its soul. You have to care about your neighbor first. The hope will be found in a space of openness defined by education, honesty, trust, forgiveness and equality, rather than hubris. Kansas City should seek to be a place actively trespassed and forgiving of trespassers.”

-Hesse McGraw-

Fill:ReFill was a design studio collaboration between fifth-year architecture students at the University of Kansas and el dorado architects of Kansas City. Throughout the course of the semester, the studio was challenged with rethinking the function of a site holding an aging public swimming pool in the Westside neighborhood near downtown Kansas City, Missouri.

Initially, through a series of on-the-street urban investigations, the studio determined a program for the site, focusing primarily on outdoor community services. The outdoor public swimming pool, a dying breed within the urban public realm, remained a central aspect of the program. Inspired by the complex, eclectic history of the Westside neighborhood, the studio was segmented into a series of 3-week design “cycles.” Each cycle reconsidering the site and program through the convergance of varying multidisciplinary influences. As a studio process, Fill:ReFill actively synthesized research and design, valuing an evolving body of work over singular design solutions. [More]

studio website: www.fillrefill.ku.edu