Known for its architecture, the City of Columbus will soon add artistic bus shelters based on student designs to its repertoire.
Nearly $330,000 in READI 2.0 Arts and Culture grants will go toward building three new bus shelters, inspired by the original one installed in 2025 in NexusPark along Herman Darlage Drive. The first shelter was designed by students in 2024, led by Lucas Brown, senior lecturer of architecture and director of design-build at the J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program. Those students, along with Ignition Arts, a public art fabrication studio in Indianapolis, are partnering to build the shelters. While a typical bus shelter costs about $25,000, the artistic ones are about $100,000 each.
City of Columbus Transportation Director Matt Dudukovich said installing these bus shelters is part of an initiative called Activation Downtown Columbus 2030, which aims to make the downtown area more lively. Dudukovich said one of the three shelters will be on heavily-traveled Third Street. Spots for the others are still to be determined.
“We will choose very public places that get a lot of traffic by which to leverage that downtown artsy look that we're going for, an architecturally significant look,” he said.
Dudukovich said a route study from 2024 found that the community appreciates the efficiency and cleanliness of the buses, but they want to reach more places around town. The three new artistic bus shelters contribute to that goal.
“We have 150 bus stops today, and we only have 17 bus shelters, and so my aspiration is to get that up to 50,” he said. “…The city is very supportive of this service and of providing shelters to our community, but it's going to take a number of years by which to get it implemented.”
Brown said the original design will be tweaked based on various factors, including location and context.
“The context is really important, especially when it comes to transparency and which direction is the bus coming from, right?” Brown said. “Because the bus driver needs to see the bus rider, so that's going to determine where we need transparency. Is it facing east-west or north-south? Because that's going to change the way that we're thinking about climate. So just taking a singular bus stop and or a bus shelter and plopping it in all these different places, then it's not really addressing context.”
How the original design came to be
Students in fall 2024 took a stakeholder engagement course with Brown; that work involved riding buses and talking with bus drivers, setting up a booth at an ethnic expo to talk with citizens, conducting online surveys and more. The primary focus was answering the question: how do you create a bus stop that reflects and engages the citizens of Bartholomew County?
“It's not a bus shelter; it's a bus stop experience. And how does it reflect and engage the citizens of Bartholomew County?” Brown said. “So, what does it mean to be a citizen of Bartholomew County, and how does this bus stop experience reflect that experience or that community?”
Some key themes that came up were safety, maintenance, and climate protection. Students designed the bus stop to account for high wind speeds and getting out of the sun and rain. When it comes to maintaining the bus shelter, Brown said they thought about how steel, for example, rusts a lot, especially if salt is on the sidewalk, and is harder to manage. Through stakeholder engagement, students also found that feeling safe at the bus stop was also important for community members.
“How does somebody feel safe in a bus stop? How are they able to move out of the bus stop?” Brown said. “How can they sit in a place that isn't necessarily just scrunched up right next to somebody they don't want to sit next to? Are they visible? Is there light, etc.”
Students in the design-build studio class took a semester’s worth of feedback and data and collaborated to design the bus shelter. Students designed about five shelters each and then worked together to see what key themes arose.
“This isn't necessarily a lowest common denominator process where you're like, okay, we're going to take this idea and this idea, and we're going to put it together, and it's sort of this mishmash of ideas. It's not what we're talking about,” he said. “We're talking about looking for ideas that come out of the intersection and looking for the best ideas, kind of like leaving the ego at the door. It's not about any one individual; it's about collectively how they're working together.”
Ana Gaither was one of six students who helped design and build the bus stop that spring. She focused on making the folded triangular plates; she also helped weld the molds that were used to pour the foundation and sand the structure. When designing the shelter, she and others kept in mind safety, visibility and inclusivity. One of the main topics of discussion when building was the concept of hostile architecture.
“We listened to a lot of stakeholders and the City of Columbus employees and their concerns for people propagating throughout the bus shelter, or using it to sleep on, or basically loiter in the area, which we understood as a valid concern,” she said, “but we didn't want to design something that appeared hostile, such as having armrests in the middle of those benches, or seeming like we were preventing certain groups of people from sitting or using the bus shelter.”
Negar Yaghoubpour worked alongside Gaither and focused on developing the pattern and design of the C’s that appear on the shelter. Designer Paul Rand first created the “Dancing C’s” in 1974 for Columbus; the Dancing C’s are now a prominent part of Columbus’s identity, and appear in architecture, buses and bike racks around the city.
“Thinking about the Columbus identity and how can we bring it to the bus shelter,” Yaghoubpour said. “And something that we heard a lot from the community was that yes, we have the C's all over the city. Are you going to include that?”
Once the final design was approved, students worked alongside fabricators in the Ignition Art Shop in Indianapolis and structural engineers to make the final product. The American Institute of Steel Construction contributed $15,000 in grant funding to pay for the first shelter; the rest of the money came from the City of Columbus and the Heritage Fund of Bartholomew County.
What comes next
The American Institute of Steel Construction, which partially funded the first bus shelter, awarded Brown a second grant to build a second one. When classes start next week, students will go through the same stakeholder engagement process and evaluate what worked best in the first shelter and what can be changed.
The upcoming shelter could incorporate structural steel; Brown said the original had folded plate steel that didn’t touch the ground so materials such as salt couldn’t reach it and rust it. He’s also considering using perforated metal instead of glass.
Brown said his focus is on being intentional with the new designs and responding to stakeholder feedback. He doesn’t want to just replicate the exact design of the shelter in NexusPark.
“There may even be a particularity about the specific community that the shelter's in that might influence the way that you think about pattern and meaning for that particular community,” he said. “We're trying to create a flexible system that creates a cohesive language, but the shelters, we want those to adapt to specific contexts.”
The next artistic bus shelter is scheduled to be installed in the spring. The remaining two will be designed and built in the next few years.
Gaither and Yaghoubpour are excited to see their work have a lasting impact on the Columbus community.
“I'm very excited to see this bus shelter showing up in other parts of the city because something that we worked on was the modularity aspect of the bus shelter,” Yaghoubpour said, “and knowing that they received the funds, so they're going to build more of that all over the city, is very meaningful for me.”
