The Totems of 18th Street

The five- or six-thousand-square-foot pocket park at the corner of Rhode Island and 18th Streets on Buffalo’s far West Side isn’t really uninviting, but it has an appearance of unfinished desuetude. Nine or 10 medium-height maples, a couple of nondescript paved surfaces, and a couple of empty wood-beam-bordered plant beds interrupt its grassy surfaces.

UB students work on forms for concrete totems.

If a University at Buffalo architectural professor and a group of his students are successful, the 18th Street Park will become not just a much more attractive neighborhood gathering spot, but a striking example of small-scale urban-space design in a densely inhabited city area, wedded to aesthetic achievement.

Brad Wales, an Allentown resident who teaches at UB’s School of Architecture and Planning, is guiding the work of 27 students and a number of private firms and community organizations, assisted by a city financial contribution initiated by a present and a former Common Council member, in transforming the park. When the work is completed sometime next spring, the space will feature a number of bordered grassy and planted areas, alternating with paved surfaces, and, most dramatically, what Wales and Cynnie Gaasch, an artist collaborating with him, have called “a visually permeable fence” along the park’s western side.

This will be composed primarily of a series of 6.5- to 7.5-foot-high concrete “totems,” set inches apart from each other. Each of these similarly composed but irregularly shaped vertical structures will be embellished with at least one handmade ceramic tile, made by neighborhood children under the supervision of Gaasch and mosaic artist/sculptor Nancy Gabriel. Each totemic “sculpture” will be lit by a four-foot-high LED light installed on the structure next to it along the fence line. (The visually porous fence borders the property of the Urban Roots gardening cooperative, which will supply volunteers to maintain the park.) The total effect is of a usable, confined urban space that enhances the lives of city residents on practical and aesthetic levels.

The park project is part of the Small Built Works program Wales leads and which has produced a number of small, practical structures that architecturally enhance settings around Buffalo, and make them more usable.

An exhibition of student-built models of the totems, graphic renderings and plans for the park will be held Friday evening at 6pm, October 24, at 164 Allen Street in Buffalo. The project will be presented by Wales’s students at 7pm.

—george sax