Nicholas DiFrank
Tell us about the path you’ve taken as a creative and how that has led you to the Roaring Fork Valley?
“It’s funny but true that my journey as a creative started early, I really must give credit to a deep infatuation with Legos and drawing. Growing up outside of Buffalo, NY, I enjoyed a creative upbringing and supportive family experience where my parents led with a very hands-on approach to life that was deeply rooted in creative exploration, power tools, getting dirty, and adventure of the natural world.
In college I developed a personalized major that blended sculptural installation with digital imaging, while minoring in art history. Several installations I had done helped establish an excitement for a larger and more engaging connection between society, art, and the natural environment. After undergrad, I moved to Boulder, CO to test life within the professional art world by working with two local studios. One focused on large-scale hot glass and the other on sculpture and installation art. It was through the latter (Wingren Sculpture) where I realized the dynamic practice of Landscape Architecture.
Over the subsequent 16-years, I had the opportunity to work as a Landscape Architect and Urban Designer for some great teams on the Front Range while obtaining master’s degrees in each practice area. Experiencing both private and public offices was incredibly insightful as they helped me understand the complexity of the field while reinforcing the importance of a rigorous approach to the design process, place-based design ethics, and community engagement.
My family and I moved to the Roaring Fork in early 2018 after I received an offer to join a large design firm in Aspen. We all fell in love with Carbondale instantly and knew this was where we wanted to raise our kids and continue our professional work. At nearly 20-years in, I began my current company, RE:LAND, in early 2020 and haven’t looked back. It has been a great experience to develop a local company at this point in my career, while working with amazing clients, communities, and projects on a national level.”
In your roles as a Carbondale resident, Planning & Zoning Vice-Chair, Carbondale Arts board member, and local small business owner you are deeply engaged in the creative community. What do you see as Carbondale’s biggest opportunities to leverage our creative character and ethos? or What role do you think creativity plays in shaping our community?
“I think our community is making great strides by keeping our creative spirit and core values tied to the major conversations within community development, environmental regeneration, and the natural evolution of Carbondale’s town character. As our population continues to change, its reasonable to expect that areas like density, mobility and the environment will be impacted. Responding to these challenges as an engaged creative community will provide us with an opportunity to weave the dynamic qualities of Carbondale that we love most throughout our greater urban fabric, while creating more thoughtful mobility, housing, and placemaking systems. Looking to the future, it would be exciting to see the creative placemaking successes happening in our Downtown Core extend into places like the 133 Corridor, outward to the Town periphery and throughout the future Downtown North.”
Describe the overall concept of the Youth Art Park and how you see it impacting Carbondale.
“The Youth Art Park was a collaboration with Andi Korber of Land + Shelter and Carbondale Arts that really expanded during the early days of COVID. When my team had the opportunity to take lead on the project, I saw it as an exciting challenge to create a multi-functional play space in our urban core, while responding to the engagement process with local schools. The final design for the Youth Art Park is intended to provide a shared social space and climactic moment along the Rio Grande Trail, where it intersects with the Downtown Promenade and eventually leads into the future Downtown North area.
The underlying project goal was to activate a portion of the abandoned rail corridor as a creative p-art-kour adventure space for residents and visitors of all ages. To help realize this intention, sloping areas of the site are used in response to requests for climbing and sliding experiences and timber elements will be used as both play and sculptural features. We also wanted to increase the functional value of the park, so some spaces will also function as an outdoor classroom, performance space and open-format adventure play zones for younger children.
Looking forward, I’m excited to see how the space will evolve to support older kid’s adventure-play needs and how this pedestrian intersection will be tied into future developments of Downtown North.”
You also recently completed an overhaul of a phone booth into an interactive installation. Tell us about that project and how you hope it might contribute to Carbondale’s Creative District?
Detail view of phone booth. Official unveiling at the 44th Annual Valley Visual Art Show in the Carbondale Arts Gallery.
“Wow, what a crazy project that turned out to be! Amy Kimberly adopted the original structure years ago and it needed some love. Originally intended to be a quick fix-up; the phone booth repair turned out to be a complete custom rebuild due to the extensive mold and rot throughout. In the end, only the three French-door walls were able to be saved.
The classic style of an English phone booth is an iconic form, so I had a lot of fun blending that concept with some mountain modern characteristics, (with help from Umbrella Roofing!) and an interior that wouldn’t actually be used for phone calls. Collaborating with Carbondale Arts staff to envision how the structure could engage and activate a positive community sentiment was also a blast.
In the end, I hope people will enjoy the playful qualities of the piece while making use of the interior message board. It would be great to see positive reflections, love letters to our Town and moments of gratitude shared within as a remembrance of how art, society and community can reflect the amazing world we coexist in.”
As a woodworker, landscape architect and urban designer your creative practices go from the scale of a small hand-crafted piece to a large-scale landscape intervention. Do these practices inform each other or what inspires you to work in such different methods?
“Great question! Absolutely, I love working at different scales as it brings a greater degree of depth and thoughtfulness to each of my practice areas. Regularly moving between project scales helps me stay honest in regard to how different design concepts or projects will provide impact, fit, and function. There’s also something I love about using changing scales within a project to balance and contrast moments of crescendo, intensity and playfulness.
I really appreciate when big bold moves create the initial intrigue and movement within large urban projects or landscapes, but it’s the details that give us a sense of ourselves and our place in this world. It's that elegant interplay that I’m so interested in. As architects, designers, or artists of any medium; I think it’s our responsibility and opportunity to engage, captivate, and reflect the world we see. Leaning on the power and impact of scale as a design tool helps me integrate lessons learned between different practice areas and mediums.”
What projects do you have coming up that you can tell us about? Or is there a dream project that you’d like to see happen in Carbondale?
“RE:LAND, is working on a lot of fun stuff right now. Currently, some of the most exciting projects I can discuss include a few large to medium scale multi-family projects locally and across the country; the master plan for the new Colorado Extreme youth hockey facility on Catherine Store Road, which is such an awesome story; and I’m looking forward to the next phase of a City-wide multi-modal infrastructure project that covers most of Louisville, CO through a series of underpasses, green linkages, and urban parks. Lastly, my office just started accepting a limited number of single-family residences, so I’ve been enjoying the deeper client relationships that result from those smaller private projects.
For a single Carbondale dream project, I would love to see the Downtown North area evolve into a positive developer-led project that truly compliments our community’s values while responding to needs for diverse housing and multi-use spaces, green connectivity, and social areas that provide multi-functional value for our Town’s residents and urban infrastructure needs.”