You Can Help Design the New Rural Learning Center Campus

Miner County Community Revitalization (MCCR) has been making plans to build a conference and training center, hotel and community kitchen on Main Street in Howard. Next week you can help decide what the Rural Learning Center campus might look like and how it might be used. A two-day design session (called a “charrette”) will be held on Tuesday, April 29 and Wednesday April 30, 2008. The purpose of the charrette is to mix local wisdom and dreams with the expertise and experience of professionals, to design a concept for the new campus. Architects, engineers, planners, and professionals from the hotel, conference, and technology industries will be in Howard for the two-day event.

“This campus will never be successful if it doesn’t live in the hearts of the people of Miner County,” said Joe Bartmann of the Rural Learning Center staff. “That’s why it’s so important they play a big part in deciding what kinds of things will happen in this place and how it all might look and fit together.” Randy Parry pointed out at the MCCR Annual Meeting this past Saturday how critical local people are to the possibility of building the campus. “It won’t happen at all if Miner County people aren’t involved,” said Parry. “We really do need the community to help create and support this project.”

The event will begin on Tuesday, April 29 at 10:30am at the Howard Legion Hall with an introduction and update on the work that has been done so far, and the ideas that have been gathered. The public is invited to participate in round table discussions and visioning sessions throughout the day on Tuesday. At 7pm on Tuesday, the design team will host a Town Hall meeting at the Howard High School Gym where the public will get an update of the day’s work, provide ideas and feedback, and use hand held live voting technology to select preferred design elements and a look and feel for campus buildings.

Day Two of the campus design charrette will be all about designing and sketching concepts of buildings and how they might fit together. The design studio will be set up at the Legion Hall, and the public is welcome to stop in and watch the team work throughout the day from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm. At 4:30pm at the Legion Hall the design team will present a series of conceptual drawings and invite public feedback and ideas.

Campus Design Workshop 1: Training

On April 1, 2008 The Rural Learning Center, MCCR and Koch Hazard Architects hosted the first of three design workshops as part of the Rural Learning Center Campus design charrette. This first workshop, held at the Howard Municipal Building, focussed on the training programming that could be offered at the Howard campus. Specifically, participants zeroed in on the potential to provide renewable energy industry technical training, and community learning around green energy.

Participants included Howard City Council members, MCCR and RLC board members, Howard school board members, Miner County Commissioners, architects from Koch Hazard, energy industry leaders from Energy Maintenance Service and Knight & Carver, technology industry leaders from Bowden Productions and Horizon Health Care and others.

Below are sketched notes from the session. A more detailed learning summary can be downloaded as a pdf by clicking here. See more pictures from the first workshop session by clicking here.