BAKER WETLANDS

Bike Shelter

Prof. Steve Harrington Fall 2020

For this project we were tasked with building a bike shelter along the Lawrence Loop biking trail in Lawrence, KS. Our site location was a section of the trail that runs through the Baker Wetlands south of Lawrence. My goal for the shelter was to represent the idea of flight in the structure. The Baker Wetlands are the natural habitat for many different kinds of animals including herons and cranes. The design also encorporates a canvas shading element, which is shaped to resemble a bird’s wings as it prepares to take flight. My structure is placed on a western section of the Lawrence Loop. This section of the trail has an intersection to another trail that leads to Broken Arrow Park to the north.

When deciding on the overall form of the pavilion, I studied the different positions of a bird when in the process of taking off and mapped them as a journey of still images. I then took the motion that the stills created and distilled it into the form of the canvas structure between the posts.