NEA grant funds ‘rain terrain’ in downtown Conway
by January 30, 2017 9:39 am 421 views
The University of Arkansas Community Design Center and the city of Conway might transform a flood-prone section of the city’s downtown square into an art park, and the National Endowment for the Arts is paying $50,000 toward the plan, the UA announced on Monday (Jan. 30).
The Ecological Design Group is helping on the project, called “Water and Wildness: Reimagining the Town Square as a Rain Terrain.”
Conway receives an average of 51 inches of rainfall each year, 30% above the national average, according to data collected during the last 30 years by National Climactic Data Center.
“’Rain terrains’ are a new concept for wet areas like Conway,” according to a UA press release. “Designed to hold water rather than allow drainage, a rain terrain works as a sponge, combining ecological engineering with landscape architecture and hydrology to maximize water absorption and minimize runoff.”
The project will allow for new developments in the town square, Steve Luoni, director of the Community Design Center and a Distinguished Professor in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, said in the press release. “The idea is to use soft engineering to manage the water, which is much cheaper than building new infrastructure, and also gives you a really great landscape,” he said. “The idea is an urban park that also delivers ecological services.”
The town square design will feature “low-impact development treatment landscapes,” according to the release. “The landscape design for the square features living walls, wire mesh container gardens and footbridges, rookeries as landmarks, espaliers, and sculptural butterfly gardens that call attention to landscape systems. Water-loving trees such as poplars and willows absorb water through their root systems.”
This NEA grant is one of 970 Art Works grants totaling nearly $26 million to organizations in 48 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin islands.
The Community Design Center is an outreach program of the Fay Jones School.
The town square design is part of the larger Urban Watershed Framework Plan for Conway, designed to remove Lake Conway and surrounding streams from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Impaired Waterbodies List. A three-year, nearly $500,000 EPA grant, administered by the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, has helped fund the project.