Salt Lake residents tackle proposed public-safety campus

Roughly 150 Salt Lakers tinkered with LEGO blocks and sketched out plans Saturday for the city's proposed public-safety complex east of the Salt Lake City Main Library.

"It's a very useful tool," said Jack Hammond, of the American Institute of Architects, which oversaw the daylong workshop. "It gives people a chance to try and solve these problems themselves."

Seated around maps of the city's proposed "civic campus," groups of amateur planners mapped out building sites for an emergency-operations center and a police and fire administration building.

Most seemed to agree on one thing: Leave Library Square alone.

"If they have to put it (on 300 East), put it across the street," said Brandon Creer, a regular library patron who stumbled across the design workshop Saturday.

Lisa Sewell, director of the Utah Arts Festival, preferred placing two curved buildings wrapped around a swath of open space on the east side of the street.

It has "been a challenge" to program on the east side of the library block, Sewell said, and expanding the open area there would help with that.

"This has been helpful," she said of the workshop. "They needed this process three months ago." Original Article