Fitness facilities aren't known for their art work. Generally speaking, gyms aren't prized for their architectural aesthetic, either. But the Southeast Community Center, perched above 63rd Street at the edge of Swope Park, inspires residents to sweat in style.
The $10.5-million work-out and meeting space opened less than a year ago and it's still one of the city's greenest public facilities. Designed to LEED Silver standards -- a long acronym that basically means national experts have signed off on the building's environmental attributes -- the Southeast Community Center has a rain garden blanketing its north slope and a big native-plants patch hugging the front entrance. Generous windows fill the 47,000-square-foot space with natural light instead of fluorescent glare and even the bathrooms engage in water-saving tactics.
When I took a peek inside, during my canvas of 63rd Street, I discovered that even the art is eco-inspired.
"Inheritance" is a multi-piece installation from Julia Cole, chair of interdisciplinary studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, and local designer Leigh Rosser. Based on the facility's function, the collaboration focused on the meaning of community. "Because the community center is on the edge of Swope Park, we were thinking about both human and ecological communities," Cole says.
The first piece catches visitors' attention as soon as they walk through the door. The "Common Ground" map is made to be touched -- the creamy wood surface is cut and curved to mimic the hills and gullies of the park itself. A little blue light, gently blinking, is the only artificial addition. That marks the spot of the community center.
Just beyond the entrance, visitors pass under the "Ripple Effect," a 150-foot cascade of blue, plastic waves that flutter gracefully in the ebb and flow of the building's ventilation. Before they see the treadmills or the indoor track, they're treated to three more "Inheritance" maps, each with a different take on Swope Park's landscape.
"The 'Map of Possibility' focuses on the geology -- the way that earthquakes, explosions, gravity, erosion and the properties of the minerals in the earth have shaped the land," she says. The blue strands represent water we see today; the green lines evoke now-dry paths where water left its mark.
But the most intriguing -- the one that held me captive as I read every word -- is "The Map of Being." For that piece, Cole and Rosser took field trips into Swope Park during the spring and summer of 2008. They interviewed the people they met, asking them about their experiences and remembrances of this natural area.
"At first we did written documentation, but then we realized that recording would allow us to have more natural conversations," Cole says. "Leigh managed all the equipment, and I just talked to people until they ran out of memories. It was a tremendous experience. I was so surprised at how many stories people had about the park, and how funny and sad they were."
Snippets of those conversations are printed on that final map. Here are just three:
When I was a kid in this park, white people was on one side and black people on the other and they called it Watermelon Hill where we had our picnics. We used to go crawdadding. There were streams that ran through here and we used to catch crayfish on our picnics. -- Rosetta, 56
People used to come here with their dates and drive down to the lagoon. On Sundays, a lot of people brought down toy motor boats -- older people would bring their kids to sail them. There was a gentleman called Horace Peterson. Their boat went out of range. He swam out to get it and drowned. One of his sons tried to save him, but he couldn't and another man had to rescue the boy. Mr. Peterson was a great community leader. -- Amos, 52
I grew up by 75th and Prospect, where they used to have Fairyland. We would walk down the Blue River along the creeks into the park. ... We came across this huge turtle one day, right over there, in the creek by Lake of the Woods. My brother and his friends were being mean and took a stick to poke at it. One little boy jabbed a stick in there and it bit off his finger. We had to wrap it up and take it back home. He was 9. We made bandages from our T-shirts. -- Pat, 48
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