AIA Toledo Member Project Featured at PARK(ing) Day

Each September, PARK(ing) Day invites communities around the world to rethink the role of the street. What begins as a single parking space becomes a temporary public place, an experiment in designing safer, greener, and more equitable streets for people. This year, Toledo Design Collective (TDC) continued that tradition locally, supporting designers, artists, architects, planners, and community groups through a grant program made possible by the Ohio Arts Council.

AIA Toledo Associate Member and board member Jake Blasko, of mADE architects designers engineers, was among the recipients of this year’s PARK(ing) Day grant. Working in partnership with TARTA and a team of designers from mADE and Bowling Green State University, Blasko helped bring a striking, transit‑oriented installation to life.

 What could a parking space become if it belonged to people instead of cars? The team’s answer was a sculptural, modular structure built from cardboard tubing and custom 3D‑printed joints. Designed as an asymmetrical, directional truss, the installation acted almost like a wayfinding device—reframing a standard parking space as a threshold and demonstrating how small footprints can morph to the demands of transit-oriented development.

AIA Toledo member, Jake Blasko, Associate AIA, earns the People’s Choice Award.

A diamond trusswork built from cardboard tubing and 3D-printed joints.

Although rain moved the installation indoors to Graphite Design + Build, the project continued to perform exactly as intended. Without the open street to orient it, the structure shifted into a new configuration, adapting to its environment and still serving as a gathering point for visitors. Its modularity became the story: a system designed to respond to context did just that.

The installation earned the People’s Choice Award, a testament to the team’s creativity and the community’s enthusiasm for reimagining public space.

AIA Toledo was proud to support PARK(ing) Day as a Commercial Parking Sponsor, reinforcing our commitment to design advocacy, public engagement, and collaboration across Toledo’s design ecosystem. Congratulations to Jake Blasko, the mADE and BGSU team, and TDC for advancing conversations about public space and the role of design in shaping more connected communities.