Terreform ONE has announced Made in Lower East Side (MiLES) as winner of ONE PRIZE 2012: From BLIGHT to MIGHT – an open international design competition powered by the idea that social, ecological, and economic struggles can simultaneously be addressed through collaborative action and innovative design.
MiLES and three honorable mentions were selected from the twenty finalists we presented to you in August. The competition drew 115 teams and 655 team members from more than 20 countries and five continents, generating an exciting mix of innovative solutions and 21st century alternatives to the American Dream. Continue after the break to see the winning proposal!
WINNER: Made in Lower East Side (MiLES)
Co-Founders: Sarah Fathallah, Matthew Goble, Eric Ho, Rick Lam, Matthew Rouser, Chloe Tseung; Founding Partners: Architecture Commons, CityAPI, Fourth Arts Block, OpenIDEO; Advisors: Tamara Greenfield, Ashley Jablow; Special Thanks to: Kristina Drury of TYTHEdesign.
MiLES is a “multi-disciplinary initiative that facilitates an open process of temporary transformations of underutilized sites by listening, co-creating, prototyping and operating with local residents” and aims to “build a movement for open and bottom-up urban planning”. MiLES not only stood out to the jury for “creating an access point” and “crowd sourcing not only lots but making available resources” (David Belt) as well as “providing a win-win for individuals, businesses and landlords” but also for the project’s implicit potential to become a “long-term part of interesting viable communities” (Andrew Kimball). There was widespread enthusiasm among jury members for the project’s focus and dedication to the involvement of multiple stakeholders, to its positive impact on the neighborhood, its bottom-up approach and compelling feasibility. MiLES plans to use the prize money ($5,000!)towards the construction of one of their interventions.
Honorable Mention: Urban Food Source
Christine Nasir, Dolores O’Connor, Courtney Hunt and Amy Maresko. This competition entry was produced as a part of the C-BIP Studio at Columbia University GSAPP, Spring 2012. Special thanks to our classmates for collaboration in sustainable building element design: Collin Anderson, Justin Fabrikant, Christopher Geist, Ayesha Husain, Michael Marsh, Mary McConnell, BumHee Lee, Anh Minh Ngo, Mia Zinni. See studio process at C-BIP.org
Urban Food Source seeks, according to the design team, to “create a microclimate of food-related commerce through networked small-scale growing, processing, and local distribution” and provides “a deployable method for transforming similar unused space”. The project drew the attention of the members of the jury board for its intelligent use of existing infrastructures in terms of logistics and spatial qualities, for representing a “fairly well thought out strategy for leveraging underused waterfront space”, as well as for the idea to create “a food district to serve the city with more sustainable food products” (Mahadev Raman).
Honorable Mention: Re-Place
design/buildLAB at Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design, led by Keith and Marie Zawistowski and their students Anne Agan, Chris Drudick, Jacob Geffert, Rachel Gresham, Shannon Hughes, Elizabeth Madden, Ryan McCloskey, Brett Miller, Elizabeth Roop, Erin Sanchez, Sara Woolf, Emily Angell, Zachary Britton, Chris Cromer, German Delgadillo, Cody Ellis, Andrew McLaughlin, Megumi Ezure, Kyle Lee, Leo Naegele, Ian Shelton, Brent Sikora, Samantha Stephenson, Taylor Terrill, Tyler Atkins, Lauren Duda, Huy Duong, Derek Ellison, Katherine Harpst, Margaret Nelson, Leah Schaffer, Emarie Skelton, and Samantha Yeh.
Re-Place gives two built examples of auspicious architectural interventions in blighted downtown areas by design/buildLAB, a third year architecture studio focused on the research, development and implementation of innovative construction methods and architectural designs. Students collaborated with local communities and experts to develop concepts and build solutions to real world problems. The underlying idea of the presented projects is, pursuant to the members of design/buildLAB, to “re-inject a distinct sense of livability and cultural identity”, and “to engender a renewed sense of place” through “vibrant civic architecture”. Re-place appealed to the board members for its involvement of local communities, for “addressing the idea of blight to might” (David Belt) and not at least for being built – a fact that Leslie Koch, among others, admired.
Honorable Mention: Urban Transfer
Justin Hui, a B.Arch graduate from Cornell University’s Department of Architecture, is currently working at Kennedy and Violich Architecture in Boston.
Urban transfer engages an abandoned rail yard in central Chicago, using, according to Justin Hui, “the logic of the rail locomotive as an active form of material and social transfer to weave nearby Chinatown, Downtown, and Pilsen and develop an urban landscape informed by the collage of these three places.” The proposal “explores various notions of transfer that allow an undercurrent memory “. The jury members picked the proposal for its potential to “bridge neighborhoods together” (Matilda McQuaid) and the idea to “develop disused rail yards in such a way that they become catalysts for promoting greater interaction amongst adjacent communities” (Mahadev Raman).
ONE PRIZE 2012 Jury
This year’s jury was chaired by the Speaker of New York City Council, Christine Quinn. Members of the jury panel who met at the AIA New York Chapter: Center for Architecture to narrow down twenty finalists to one winner and three honorable mentions included David Belt, Founder and Executive Director of Macro Sea, Katie Codey, who attended as a representative of Speaker Quinn, Andrew Kimball, President and CEO of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation, Leslie Koch, President of The Trust for Governors Island, Matilda Mc Quaid, Deputy Curatorial Director of Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum and Mahadev Raman, Chairman of Americas Arup. Miquela Craytor, Director for Industrial Initiatives of NYCEDC and Robert Hammond, Co-Founder of the Friends of the High Line joined the jury session by telephone. Jury members Carlo Aiello, Editor-in-Chief of eVolo Magazine, Evan Douglis, Dean, RPI School of Architecture, Dan D’Oca of Principal of Interboro Partners, and Jason Goodman, Co-Founder and Executive Director of 3rd Ward were unable to attend, however their scores were sent in before the meeting, and were included in the final tally.
Images and project descriptions courtesy of ONE PRIZE 2012.
UPDATE (October 9th, 2012): An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Terreform ONE, the event organizer, had won the competition. The misunderstanding has been corrected.
