City Hall hopes competition among designers will lift Falls Park to new heights

Sioux Falls plans a makeover at its namesake park, and officials hope infusing some friendly competition between companies in the architecture and design world will lift the project to new heights.

In the last two decades, the city has added dozens of acres to the boundaries of Falls Park through land acquisitions and parcel redevelopment. And it's become the destination for hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

That's why officials with the Parks and Recreation Department say the walkways and layout of the pedestrian elements of the park campus are no longer adequate and need to be upgraded. With that in mind, City Hall this week announced it will use a "design competition" to gather ideas for expanding and improving the infrastructure at Falls Park in the coming years.

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"When you look at Falls park in its entirety, it spans all the way from Sixth Street to the south all the way up the spillway to the north and in between Weber and Phillips Avenue corridor, so it’s really a large area," said Mike Patton, a park development specialist with the city. "As the community continues to redevelop in the area, we think it's important to take a more comprehensive approach."

A design competition is an alternative to a more typical process used by the city of Sioux Falls where a single architecture firm is hired to create a design before a construction company is hired. Instead, the city will put out a call for designs in hopes of spurring wide-ranging ideas for how to improve and enhance the park.

Eventually, all ideas the city receives will be considered by a selection committee before the architects with the best four ideas will each be given a $10,000 stipend to continue working through their concepts and even incorporate other ideas the city in the first phase of the competition.

It's a process used elsewhere in the country, including at the Nicollett Mall in Minneapolis and Omaha's Green the City project. 

Patton said the call for designs will ask interested architecture firms to create concepts that aren't so grandiose that they're unrealistic, incorporate improvements into existing spaces and natural features of the park and be a catalyst for surrounding redevelopment like the Weber Avenue corridor.

The selection committee will be a mix of mayoral appointments, city staff and park board members and at least one city councilor. 

The winning design elements could see implementation through construction as early as 2021.

Mayor Paul TenHaken, who's made finding different ways to tackle city challenges, said he hopes a new approach to project design will yield positive results for Sioux Falls.

"We are continually looking into more areas where we can crowdsource ideas from the community to build a stronger Sioux Falls," he told the Argus Leader Friday. "We’re quite excited to see what visions will be laid out for our namesake park from this innovative approach."