Imagine sitting in traffic where Division Street meets Spokane Falls Boulevard and Trent Avenue, and instead seeing a weedy concrete traffic divider, you get an eyeful of picturesque 80-foot-tall steel columns with water cascading down their sides.


A recent Washington State University at Spokane design and construction competition has produced that concept and others for improving the Division Street entrance to downtown Spokane and for creating a unique architectural gateway feature at the Division-Trent-Spokane Falls junction.


The competition involved 22 teams of WSU-Spokane students who study architecture, landscape architecture, interior design, and construction management, says David Wang, an associate professor of architecture. Teams received competition guidelines on a Tuesday morning and had to have a design concept completed by 5 p.m. on that Thursday.


The winning entry includes a gateway architectural feature that consists of 15 steel columns ranging in size from 50 feet tall to 80 feet tall that would stand on the triangular traffic divider at the busy junction of Division Street, Trent Avenue, and Spokane Falls Boulevard. The columns, as designed, would be a have water streaming down the sides with pools of water at their base. The columns would be clad in opaque plastic with internal colored lighting.


In addition to the gateway feature, the winning entry included a water sculpture at the Interstate 90-Division Street interchange, refurbishment of a train bridge over Division, and conversion of Division into a boulevard with a light-rail system and with a nearby terminal.


Other gateway features proposed by design teams included a sculpture featuring a large hand holding a yellow sun-like ball to represent the original meaning of the word Spokane, which is children of the sun. Another idea had large water features with an aquatic theme up and down the stretch of Division between the I-90 interchange and Spokane Falls Boulevard. Other ideas included a large abstract glass structure and a pedestrian skywalk with a train trestle feel.


These competitions, called community design and construction charrettes, are held annually and have focused on a number of different types of projects, such as design of a Great Gorge Park along the Spokane River one year and a conceptual high-rise office building in downtown Spokane another year.