Lamar Station Classroom for Urban Farming in Lakewood, Colo., Wins Steel Award
(Chicago, IL) – The Lamar Station Classroom for Urban Farming in Lakewood, Colo., has earned national recognition in the 2017 Innovative Design in Engineering and Architecture with Structural Steel awards program (IDEAS2). In honor of this achievement, members of the project team will be presented with awards from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) during a ceremony to take place at the structure on Friday, August 18, at 10:30 a.m.
“An ingenious use of steel for an enclosure that simultaneously obscures and reveals its contents,” commented April Y. Wang, a structural engineering master’s student at Purdue University’s Bowen Laboratory, and the engineering student juror in the competition.
The mission of this outdoor classroom is to educate residents of the nearby transit-oriented development about urban farming, while simultaneously providing space for environmental education and other youth programs. The project brief required the structure to have an opaque wall preserving the privacy of the classroom near the path leading to the light rail line, which was achieved with vertically oriented steel bar grate cladding. In this case the skin is structural, providing dynamic transparency as well as support for the majority of the structure’s gravity loads.
The project’s team members include:
- Owner: Metro West Housing Solutions, Lakewood, Colo.
- General Contractor and Architect: ColoradoBuildingWorkshop, Denver
- Structural Engineer: Structuralist, Ft. Collins, Colo.
The 13 IDEAS2 winners for 2017 were chosen from nearly 100 submissions received from architectural and engineering and other project team member firms throughout the U.S. Each submission is reviewed and award winners are selected by a nationally recognized panel of design and construction industry professionals.
The IDEAS2 award dates back more than 50 years with AISC. And about this year’s winning outdoor classroom structure, Charlie Carter, SE, PE, PhD, president of AISC, said, “This design really draws you in. It’s the site I wish we had every nice day back when I was in college and we would ask if we could hold the class outside.”
Members of the media may request high-resolution images of the project by contacting AISC’s Tasha Weiss at 312.670.5439 or [email protected]. For more information about the IDEAS2 awards and to view all of this year’s winners, please visit www.aisc.org/ideas2. Entries for the 2018 competition are due by October 6, 2017.
American Institute of Steel Construction
The American Institute of Steel Construction, headquartered in Chicago, is a non-partisan, not-for-profit technical institute and trade association established in 1921 to serve the structural steel design community and construction industry. AISC’s mission is to make structural steel the material of choice by being the leader in structural steel-related technical and market-building activities, including: specification and code development, research, education, technical assistance, quality certification, standardization, and market development. AISC has a long tradition of service to the steel construction industry of providing timely and reliable information.
