Bus Shelters

This 2½-week design project served as a primer for multiple course sections of ARCH 410: NAAB Comprehensive Studio in the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska.

This assignment challenged students to design a bus shelter that expresses a tectonic vocabulary while fulfilling a demonstrated need of urban dwellers.

Students first read and discussed the Introduction to Kenneth Frampton’s “Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture” as a means for familiarizing oneself across a spectrum of stereotomics, tectonics, and atectonics. Furthermore, this project served as an opportunity for each student to demonstrate their design thinking and final execution skills in the first few weeks of the Fall semester.

Site

The site is the northeast corner of N Street & South 8th Street, immediately adjacent to the City of Lincoln Haymarket District.

Design Constraints

·at minimum, the bus shelter shall accommodate five people sitting and five people standing

·shall provide enclosure and protection from adverse weather

·shall not exceed the volumetric extents of 40’ length, 15’ depth, and 12’ height

·may not encroach upon face of existing curb closer than 12”

·may engage the existing sidewalk, but without obstruction to pedestrians

Final Presentation

Bus shelter designs were presented exclusively through a single presentation model at ½” = 1’ scale. The model shall reflect the same level of detail proportional to the author’s intentional expression of tectonic assemblies and aesthetics. The final jury was a form of peer review where designs were both nominated by and discussed by students. A book prize was awarded to the most exceptional design, as determined by peer consensus.