WSU students offer ideas

A class of 22 WSU students will sketch up the designs for the river walk of the Brownsfield project and other river crossings in a three week project starting in early May.

Palouse city staff will examine the resulting designs for creative ideas for the river crossing portion of the Brownsfield project.

“I think it’s awesome for the community and the students,” said Palouse mayor Michael Echanove after a city council meeting Feb. 9.

The Brownsfield project is a restoration project for a patch of land in downtown Palouse that was polluted by a fertilizer company in the 1980s. The Department of Ecology, Palouse, and a consultant company Maul Foster Alongi are working together to restore the land to a working piece of city life.

As the land sits directly on the Palouse river, a component of the Brownsfield project will be to design something that incorporates the river with whatever is built on the Brownsfield site- such as a bridge over the river.

Students will come out to the river to take measurements on this beach, as well as other river crossing points along a potential path along the river the city is considering.

WSU professor Ole Sleipness, with the department of horticulture and landscape architecture, contacted MFA Brownsfield project manager Michael Stringer last month asking if he would work with his class.

The course, titled “Recreation Design,” features mostly WSU juniors majoring in landscape architecture.

“I would like my students to generate conceptual designs for the River Walk, complete detailed designs of key areas along the path such as crossings, nodes, and other areas of interest, and think through possible finished materials, fixtures, and signage,” Sleipness wrote in an e-mail to the mayor.

Echanove said city staff and MFA will very much welcome the ideas of the students, seeing as it gives the city an even more broad and rich spectrum of angles to choose from.