The spring break that never happened
Everyone was leaving campus but them.
Cody Klein, a fifth-year landscape architecture major, watched as fellow students began spring break while he and his teammate, Seth Slifer, slaved away on a project.
They were working on their entry for an international competition the American Society of Landscape Architects holds.
“We worked from January to June, and I’m not exaggerating to say we worked 14-hour days, six days a week. And on the seventh day, we were thinking about it,” Klein said.
The team had its struggles throughout the competition.
“There were several points where we were like ‘screw this,’ ” Klein said.
However, the team won the Honor Award in the analysis and planning category from the American Society of Landscape Architects, an honor no OSU student has ever won before. The two were the only undergraduate students in the competition, Slifer said.
Klein said beating students from Harvard University “felt really good.”
Klein started his architecture career working as a part-time pool builder when he was 15. His love of building and designing outdoor spaces helped him decide to become a landscape architect.
Slifer split his time between his grandparents’ house in Duncan and his home in Kansas City when he was growing up. He jumped into landscape architecture on an impulse.
“I always helped cut my grandparents grass so I jumped into the profession thinking I would probably run a landscape shop,” Slifer said. “Before, I didn’t understand the relationships between the science, the technology and the art.”
Things came together for Slifer in the OSU architecture program.
“Once I got in, the floodgates opened up and triggered things that I didn’t know I had the capacity to do,” Slifer said.
Friends, Klein and Slifer decided to be partners for a project. Klein said their pairing seemed obvious.
“(Slifer) inspires me to be a better designer,” Klein said.
The project begins
Their project began when their adviser, John Ritter, proposed a question for Klein and Slifer.
“Basically (the question) is about increasing the efficiency of our transportation methods in Oklahoma,” Klein said. “To come up with a transportation model that was more efficient that didn’t involve an automobile.”
Slifer said most of the motivation to enter the contest was brought on by the professor.
The team then began researching transportation in the Midwest in January.
“Just living (in Oklahoma) you know that transportation is an issue; everyone lives in the suburbs or rural areas,” Klein said.
Klein and Slifer had to think about current events and recent natural resource issues with oil to come up with their solution. They took their project to another level by thinking about people’s quality of life, Slifer said. The first two months of their project focused on analysis.
“We have obesity, we have fast food culture, we are always in our cars; that’s how we are defined,” Slifer said.
The team did case studies to see how having different transportation systems and a more sustainable resource than oil would affect small and rural towns.
“Rail seemed like the best option,” Klein said.
The final plan was to have a train system between Oklahoma City and Tulsa to help connect the cities and the smaller surrounding towns.
“When people think sustainability, they don’t think Oklahoma,” Klein said.
But a lot of what landscape architects deals with sustainability, Klein said.
Klein said he and Slifer could count on Mark Gregory, assistant researcher in the department of natural resource ecology and management. Klein said he took a class with Gregory before they began the project.
“Ever since that, he has been there. Every time,” Klein said.
Klein said his door was always open for questions.
On the winning train
Klein said that he and Slifer were shocked when they won.
“We knew we had a good project,” Klein said. “We never thought we had a chance; there’s a lot of politics involved,” Klein said.
The Oklahoma Department of Transportation plans to request about $2 billion in federal stimulus money to build a high-speed rail line connecting Oklahoma City and Tulsa. The specifics of the project have not yet been worked out.
It is cool to see a version of our project being put into action so quickly, Klein said.
Slifer graduated in May and Klein will graduate in December. Winning this competition would have thrown more job offers on the table for him, but with today’s market, the recession, and the rate of unemployment going up, it hasn’t done anything yet, Slifer said.
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