Kids lend playground expertise to UNLV architect students at Springs Preserve

If you could design the ultimate playground, what would it look like?

The Waters kids came to a Oct. 10 Springs Preserve playground redesign workshop packed with ideas.

Liam Waters, 8, sketched a giant train in marker.

"A cool electric train you can't get stuck in, not like that train they had before," he explained.

His sister Rori Waters, 10, had pictures and clay models featuring a lookout tower, "not so super high that you get scared," with telescopes, "so you can see the whole place," and nest swings and underground caves with roots overhead.

As the room full of children drew pictures, built models and talked about dinosaurs, swings, monkey bars, tunnels and ponds, UNLV students listened attentively, took notes, snapped photos and learned.

"Obviously, the kids are the experts at play," Springs Preserve manager Bruno Bowles said as he watched the action. "And 25 years from now, these kids might have kids of their own, and they'll bring them to the playground and say, 'This is some of the stuff I helped design.' "

UNLV landscape architecture students with the UNLV Downtown Design Center are working with the Springs Preserve to reimagine the playground, which is closed and expected to reopen next year.

"We've looked at our playground for a number of years and realized that it needed to have a revamp. There were things that needed to be reimagined," said Andy Belanger, director of public services for the Las Vegas Valley Water District, which oversees the Springs Preserve.

So far, Downtown Design Center Director Steve Clarke said the team, made up of landscape architecture students working with academic and professional advisers, has worked on in-depth site analysis, recording everything from sun and shade patterns to drainage and existing infrastructure.

Visiting playground designer Joseph Fry, of Hapa Collaborative, spoke to students and the public about his team's award-winning projects and public-space plans Sept. 24 at the Springs Preserve. Jeff Cutler, of space2place, spoke about the qualities of great places for play and the value of risky play Oct. 8.

Using a model taken from Fry's presentation, the students welcomed input from the playground's ultimate clients: children.

Clarke said initially, he thought they would get about 30 kids to share playground ideas, but within only a few hours of announcement, the workshop had 103 kids sign up. So his team recruited more volunteers from the UNLV architecture program to help record playground dreams.

With a budget of $300,000, some of those dreams may have to be scaled back. During Fry's discussion, students learned the slide alone on a giant tower climber project in Vancouver came in at $100,000.

Clarke said projects, such as the playground and a Historic West Las Vegas plan a previous class worked on, give students real clients and help bring them beyond the academic world and prepare them for professional practice.

"I try to have a team of consultants so you have that academic world and that professional world kind of collide, and then the students find themselves in the middle of it," he said.

On the West Las Vegas project, students had to design on the fly and turn out ideas in an hour that they might have taken weeks to prepare in a classroom.

"It did something to the students," Clarke said. "They saw how fast you have to react in the profession. When you teach students design, sometimes they don't believe you when you say sometimes you only have an hour to react to something."

Working with clients versus working for grades is a new experience for many.

"If a client doesn't like an idea that you're emotionally attached to, you have to be able to get over it quickly if you're going to survive very long in the design world," Clarke said.

The next step for the students is to take ideas shared by the children and draft at least two conceptual plans to be presented to program advisers in November and Springs Preserve management in December.

Visit springspreserve.org or unlv.edu/architecture.

— Contact View contributing reporter Ginger Meurer at gmeurer@viewnews.com. Find her on Twitter: @gingermmm.