Case Studies

Client Program

The Kansas Mall project will be located in downtown Huron, South Dakota. The Mall is a vacant urban infill site linking Dakota Avenue and a public parking lot heavily used by movie theater patrons and downtown workers, visitors and shoppers. The site is roughly 4000 square feet, stretching 165 feet from Dakota Avenue to the parking lot located on Kansas Avenue. The focus of the design project is to create a series of public spaces that connect the ends of the site and provide ways of engaging with the existing elements of the historic buildings surrounding the site.

Why i chose precast for the project

The materiality of the project will combine the lowness of the prairie landscape with two precast concrete walls, a long wall and a tall wall. These precast walls will be inscribed with a 1916 Sanborn Map of the city of Huron and operate as a spatial and historical reference physically unfolded on the site.

Project Details

Article in SDSU Magazine: South Dakota State University architecture students are redesigning and building a passageway and seating area outside the Kansas Mall in Huron as part of a studio course and partnership with the city. The project is part of an annual community commitment the Department of Architecture established in 2012. Students received experience working on projects they could see in their future careers. Working on the project are 17 sophomore architecture students enrolled in a 5-credit hour course, taught by Brian Rex, professor and head of the Department of Architecture, and assistant professor Federico Garcia Lammers. The architecture department is in its fifth year using grant funding from four Sioux Falls firms—Arch Inc., Koch Hazard, Perspective, TSP Inc.—and a four-year grant through the Gage Brothers Concrete Products of Sioux Falls and National Pre-cast Concrete Institute of Chicago. The first community the department worked with was Mobridge in 2013. Next fall, they will work with the Webster community, followed by Volga. The Kansas Mall links Huron's main street and a public parking lot heavily used by movie theater patrons and downtown workers, visitors and shoppers. The 4,000-square foot project site has a 25-foot wide facade that goes back 165 feet to the alley to link to the parking. The students are working with the Huron community to design a series of spaces to pass through and engage on the site. "We've been focusing on highlighting some of the historical buildings nearby and adjacent to the site while making a place that will be both a passage and destination for activities downtown," Rex said. "Last year, we found the site and initiated the project on an open site at the end of their main street in Mobridge. This year, Huron came to us with a specific site and an agenda for the site which is an in-fill site between two buildings along the main street commercial core rather than at the end of it." At the first design meeting, student teams presented 11 different concepts for the mall, which included added lighting, planters, trees and water features. The students must also incorporate a steel shelter, benches and picnic tables purchased with state and federal land and water conservation funds. Students presented their updated concepts to the community Oct. 17. "We're no longer solely focusing on space and how to shape it. The project generates new challenges relating to structural arrangement," said Levi Wager, an architecture major from Sioux Falls. "Through this course, I hope to gain a better grasp of the whole relationship in architectural design."