This park picnic shelter needed to block the low western sun, and we wanted to do that with a design move that is more friendly and engaging than a solid wall. The base is stacked bond brick, with columns of terracotta breeze block set into it, filtering the afternoon light into pattern rather than shutting it out and allowing the breeze through. After dark the direction reverses and the shelter glows from within, giving the park a landmark at the end of the day. Both materials were chosen to sit well next to adjacent Bacon Elementary School, picking up the tone of its masonry so the shelter reads as a neighbor rather than an object dropped into the site.

The roof is an irregular butterfly: its two planes folding to a low valley that echoes the dynamism of the mountains behind it. The valley gathers the entire roof into a single concealed scupper, so rain arrives as one concentrated fall of water at the low end instead of a perimeter drip making a rainstorm a small event worth witnessing! It also eliminates the city’s park maintenance burden of gutters and downspouts entirely.

Painted cruciform steel columns hold the roof clear of the walls, and a stained wood tongue-and-groove deck warms the space underneath and small moves matter at this scale: Where each column passes the roof, a metal box wraps it, so the column appears to float up through the roof plane rather than dying into it. The box also gave the wood installer a clean straight edge to land the tongue-and-groove into, instead of asking them to trim every board around the shape of the column.

[au]workshop was responsible for the architectural features of the site, while Park Planning & Development staff completed the overall park programming, landscape design and community outreach.