Building a Bike Shelter and Community Relationships

A new bike shelter is rising quickly in the parking lot of Camas Ridge Community School on 1150 East 29th Avenue in Eugene thanks to collaboration between parents, school administrators, and a team of architecture students. The students are members of designBridge, a student organization in the University of Oregon School of Architecture and Allied Arts (A&AA) that offers design/build services to local community members and organizations.

Every week, project teams of about a dozen A&AA students spend their Saturday building formwork, pouring concrete, and erecting steel columns. The bike shelter will be entirely student built, and student leaders Nick Venezia and Nate Poel expect it to be complete in the spring of 2011.

The group took on the Camas Ridge Community School project for the 2009-10 school year after Mike McCann, a parent, proposed it to them. Through a friend, he heard about designBridge’s bike shelter project at Edison Elementary and decided to initiate a similar project at Camas Ridge Elementary. “I was just looking to make our school better any way I could and this was a great way to do it.” says McCann.

DesignBridge worked with members of the school community from the beginning to make the project a success. Venezia and Poel met regularly with McCann and other parents, representatives from the Eugene 4J School District, and Camas Ridge’s principal, Wally Bryant.

At the same time the bike shelter project was moving forward, school community members were building a new outdoor classroom. DesignBridge saw this as an opportunity and worked with the outdoor classroom group, particularly Toby Barwood (B.Arch ‘93), a parent and principal at Pivot Architects, to combine resources when possible. The collaboration with the outdoor classroom helped both projects combine to meet city guidelines for storm water runoff.

DesignBridge also reached out to the community to fund the project. Local and regional businesses donated steel, concrete, lumber, rebar, paint, and construction services to the shelter. DesignBridge worked with the Eugene Safe Routes to School program to use $5000 of a federal Safe Routes to School infrastructure grant to pay for 30 bike hoops. The single largest funding source came from an education grant given by the Oregon Transportation Research and Education Consortium for nearly $29,000.

DesignBridge members received professional guidance from Mark Young, an architect with Rowell Brokaw Architects in Eugene. Young reviewed student plans and helped guide them through the permit process.

While the results of the Camas Ridge Community School will benefit the students and staff of the school, UO students also gain valuable experience. “DesignBridge is great because it's student owned and operated,” says Juli Brode, faculty advisor. “Not only do students interact with clients and community members and manage the construction of a community project, they also assess and select projects, gain leadership and teamwork skills, navigate the design process and determine decision-making criteria.”

For students like Venezia, the learning experience of designBridge was made even better thanks to the collaboration with the community. “This project is designBridge’s most ambitious project to date,” says Venezia, “and we couldn’t have done it without the contributions of parents, the school, and local businesses.”