Water, Education and Training Center
A project of Kansas State University's Design+Make Studio, The Water, Education and Training Center (WET Center) is located at Lone Oaks Farm in Middleton, Tennessee. This project involved three graduate students working along with the greater Design+Make Studio's Urban-Rural Interface prompt.
Managing stormwater, erosion, and flooding is required by municipalities, counties, state and federal agencies, universities, and private landowners. Simple structures like road culverts, in order to perform successfully, need an understanding of basic principles in hydrology and erosion. Lone Oaks Farm in partnership with the West Tennessee River Basin Authority feels an urgent need to educate landowners about how water moves across the landscape.
The proposed solution to this infrastructural issue is the creation of a completely new building type. A Water Education and Training (W.E.T.) Center is an educational program and facility to teach the basic concepts of hydrology, erosion, and green infrastructure to the people responsible for constructing water related infrastructure. Participants can experience water in volumes and velocities relatable to actual heavy rain and flood events.
Urban-Rural Interface
The Design+Make Studio at Kansas State University’s College of Architecture Planning and Design is a capstone studio focusing on real world clients with projects that make a difference in communities around the world. The focus for this Design+Make studio, was the Urban-Rural Interface.
Studio Publications
Through these projects, the studio endeavored to discover how the Urban-Rural Interface could not only create a dynamic connection between communities at a local level, but how this could create an international interface where urban and rural communities can coexist. In conjunction with this, the studio produced two books documenting research, findings and final proposals.
The Urban-Rural Interface Volume 1, Volume 2