Honor Award

ShadeWorks: Designing and Building Community Shade in Bluff, UT

Tara Abbaticchio, Student ASLA; Matthew Annabel, Student ASLA; Kennith Biesiada, Student ASLA; Brian Brehmer, Assoc. ASLA; Sarah Doyle, Student ASLA; Molly Haberman, Student ASLA; Patrick Healy, Student ASLA; Jennifer C. Leach, Student ASLA; Greg Laudenslager, Student ASLA; Kelley Price, Student ASLA; Jacob Rocamora, Student ASLA; Jessica Stonberg, Student ASLA; Caitlin Tamposi, Student ASLA; Trevor Toms, Student ASLA; Byungsun Yang, Student ASLA; Graduate, University of Colorado, Denver
Faculty Advisor: Heath Mizer, ASLA

  • ShadeWorks: Designing and Building Community Shade in Bluff, UT
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    Site Plan
    Our studio worked in conjunction with the Community of Bluff, Utah to reconnect the town to the San Juan River (1/2mi south). The ShadeWorks project provides a place of respite along the hot and exposed river walk access trail.
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  • ShadeWorks: Designing and Building Community Shade in Bluff, UT
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    Regional & Local Context
    Bluff, UT is a cultural and geologic tourism hub situated in the rural and arid southeast corner of Utah. Over the past 60 years the San Juan River has drifted ½ mile south of the town. The goal of this project was to reconnect the Bluff community to the river.
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    Community Engaging Design Process
    (Upper left) site visit with students and community; (Lower left) Bluff Community Meeting discussing the river walk trail; (Upper right) getting to know Bluff’s ancient cultural landscape; (Lower right) discussing design ideas around a campfire.
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    Solar & Landscape Alignments of Ancient Bluff Cultures
    We were inspired by the dwellings of the Ancestral Puebloan peoples that first inhabited Bluff. Their built environment shows a clear reverence to the solar cycles and local monumental landforms.
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    Bluff Community Riverwalk Master Plan
    The first goal of our design process was to create a master plan for the public access river walk trail. The master plan suggests an ancient alignments based framework for specific landscape interventions necessary to activate the river walk.
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    Early Shade Structure Concept Sketches
    The second goal of our studio was to select an element from the master plan to be designed and built to initiate activation of the river walk. The idea of a site-specific sculptural shade structure quickly rose to the top.
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    Shade Structure Options
    Our studio split into three design teams working on 3 related, yet structurally very different, shade structure designs. The three concepts were presented to the Bluff community who selected one for construction.
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    Selected Site and Shade Structure Design
    A build site was selected based on the ancient alignments master plan recommendations. The selected site was strategically located in a very exposed portion of the trail that also had great visual connections to cultural and monumental landscape elements.
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    Detailed Design - Construction Documents and Shade Studies
    Full construction documents were produced for the selected shade structure and were reviewed by a structural engineer. Optimal positioning for the shade structure was determined through a combination of shade and view-shed studies.
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    Design Build
    The community selected design was built by our student team on-site in Bluff. A local welding company fabricated custom designed parts for the tensile structure.
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    Build Progression
    These images show the progression of the shade structure build… from the framing and pouring of concrete footers, mounting of steel knife plates and angled support beams, to the addition (and woven infill) of the cabled tensioning system that supports the structure.
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    Solar Landscape
    ShadeWorks is angled to provide maximal afternoon shade during the hottest part of the day on the hottest days of the year. It opens to the summer solstice sunrise and creates dramatic and dynamic shade patterns throughout the daily and annual solar cycle.
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    Shade Transitions
    ShadeWorks marks our human connection to the monumental Bluff landscape and to the ancient peoples that once inhabited it. The dynamics of its shadow patterns offer a reverence for the solar based built landscape of 1000 years ago.
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    Connecting Community
    A public opening celebration was held upon completion of the shade structure. It was well attended by local community leaders, residents, visiting tourists, and our team of students.
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    Community Connected
    Community response suggests the ShadeWorks project may be increasing curiosity about local nature, history, and culture. It is helping to connect Bluff’s present to its past, its peoples to each other, and the town to the river.
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Project Statement

Our studio worked with the community of Bluff, UT to reconnect the town with the San Juan River. We proposed a river walk master plan aimed at activating and drawing visitors through the 1/2 mile expanse between the town and the river. This was achieved through a culturally aligned network of trails and interventions strategically located to provide visitors shaded respites from the hot sun and opportunities to discover and reflect on Bluff's monumental landscape. The Bluff community selected one intervention, named ShadeWorks, from our plan which we fully designed and built in Spring 2012.

Project Narrative

Background: Bluff, UT and the San Juan River

The town of Bluff, UT is located along the San Juan River in the rural and extremely arid southeast corner of Utah. The San Juan creates a 200-mile long ribbon of fertility through an otherwise very dry place. Bluff exists because of the San Juan. Its erosive power created a monumental landscape of geologic features that were revered by ancient cultures. One of the oldest known petroglyphs on the North American continent is found just a few miles west of Bluff along the San Juan. There is strong archeological evidence that the Ancestral Puebloans, the earliest known permanent settlers of the Bluff locale, settled and built their dwelling and ceremonial places with a great reverence to Bluff’s monumental landscape, the solar cycle, and the power of the river. Today, the San Juan defines the boundary between private Bluff landholdings (to the north) and the Navajo Nation (to the south). As recently as the 1950’s the San Juan coursed immediately proximate to the town of Bluff. Since then, it has eroded its way ½ mile to the south where it has taken up residence against the canyon wall. This has effectively disconnected many Bluff residents from the San Juan.

Goals and Objectives: Community Connection

The community/river disconnect led to recent Bluff community activism behind reconnecting the public to the river. This movement challenged our studio with one fundamental goal: Reconnect the people to the river across an extremely exposed ½ mile wide expanse of hot sand. Our key objectives were to design a site wide master plan aimed at activating the open space between the town and the river and catalyzing that activation by fully designing and building one key community selected intervention from the master plan.

Community Based Design Approach

We took up the design portion of this challenge during an intensive 8-week studio in the spring of 2012. We engaged the Bluff community during a multi-day site visit, which included all of the following:

  • A full interpretive site tour by the landowner
  • Extensive conversations with Bluff community members
  • Visits to local Navajo homes
  • Tours of local resource stockpiles and scrap-yards
  • Visits to local artisan galleries and installations
  • A tour of Bluff’s cultural and monumental landscape elements
  • Personal exploration of the Bluff landscape
  • On-site design sessions

This level of community engagement played a critical role in uncovering our key master plan design principles:

Principle 1- Engage the Axis: The main trail through the site provides river access, side trail connections, and recognizes historic alignments. The trail is lacking shade and places to take refuge or dwell for a short time. We could significantly enhance the trail’s potential for lingering, reflection, serenity, and appreciation of Bluff’s layered cultural and natural history.

Principle 2 - Create Places of Grounded Discovery: A journey along the main access trail is characterized by a rhythmic spacing of grounded nodes and opportunities for discovery. These nodes provide a framework for improvements that enhance access to the site and highlight opportunities for discovery.

Principle 3 - Material Connections: The Bluff, UT area has a rich palette of local building materials to draw from. This palette includes sandstone, river-rock, cottonwood logs, tamarisk branches, scrap steel and wood, dynamic sandy soils, and digging access to the water table. The sum potential of these materials allows for the invocation of an ancient and modern-day Bluff tradition… taking advantage of the natural attributes of native materials to weave and sculpt them into places that are both functional and offer a reverence to the surrounding landscape and its prior inhabitants.

River Walk Proposal and Build Project Selection

Our master plan proposal achieved town/river re-connection through a culturally aligned network of trails and interventions strategically located to provide visitors convenient respites from the hot sun as well as opportunities to discover and reflect on Bluff's monumental landscape. The Bluff community was presented three conceptual shade structure options and selected one intervention, named ShadeWorks, for our design studio to fully design and build on the site.

Community Build

The build portion of the project took place in Bluff in May 2012. ShadeWorks was built in conjunction with several members of the Bluff community including landowners, local business people, community leaders, and a local non-profit that designs and builds homes for the Navajo community. Upon completion ShadeWorks hosted a community celebration event comprised of Bluff residents, tourists, and visiting students.

ShadeWorks Realized

ShadeWorks rises from the desert landscape to provide a place of respite for weary visitors along the exposed public river walk from the town of Bluff, UT to the San Juan River. It forms an organic curve resembling the red rock alcoves seen in the local bluffs. Running the length of 80 feet, the structure visually peels away from the earth just enough to create an intimate space protected from the scorching afternoon sun and wind. The quality of this space is made possible by a system of triangulated tensioned cables that hold the structure taught and upright from the rear. Locally abundant willow are woven through the structural system of cables softening the aesthetics and grounding the structure within the surrounding landscape. In the spirit of ancient Bluff cultures, ShadeWorks opens to the summer solstice sunrise and provides maximal shade during the afternoons of the summer months. It is a place to warm yourself in the cool morning sunrise, to watch the sunset on the red sandstone bluffs, and to connect with Bluff’s communities of the past and present.

 

Other Contributers

Design and Build Phases

Astrid Vander

Design Phase

Grant Davis and Xiaojian Guo

Build Phase

Jason Astorino and Peter Lutz

Design Build Bluff

Cindy Bithell, Andrew Foster, Rick Sommerfield and Cortland Wilson

Structural Engineering Expertise

Charles Keyes

Archeologists

Jonathan Till and Winston Hurst

Recapture Lodge

Jim and Luanne Hook

Product Sources

Furniture – Custom Design and Construction by Student team

Fences/Gates/Walls – Custom Design and Construction by Student team

Structures – Custom Design and Construction by Student team

Other – Custom Steel Knife/Anchor Plates fabricated by J M Custom Welding, 2858 S Main St , Blanding, UT 84511

All other building materials (aside from common hardware connections) were locally donated, salvaged, or harvested by the student team.