Monday, January 14, 2008
UVa Faculty Collaborative Named Finalist in History Channel "City of the Future" Design Competition
Several UVa School of Architecture faculty members have collaborated to form Grow: DC, one of 24 finalist teams in the ?City of the Future? design competition organized by the History Channel. The competition stipulates that teams select one of three cities (San Francisco, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.) and imagine what it would look like in 100 years. Eight finalists have been selected for each city. The winner of each city competition will be given $10,000 and the opportunity to compete for the national title which will be decided by a public online vote.
GROW:DC is a design collaborative and urban think tank based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The team is led by Assistant Professors of Architecture Jason Johnson and Nataly Gattegno (Future Cities Lab LLC) and also includes Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Julie Bargmann and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Christopher Fannin (D.I.R.T. Studio), as well as Elwood R. Quesada Professor William Morrish. The team is consulted by Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture Kristina Hill and environmental engineer Byron Stigge of Buro Happold Engineers in New York.
The team?s proposal, "Harvest the City," aims to gather together the diverse and fluctuating patches of the city: ?Beyond the brilliant tyranny of its master plan, DC has to simultaneously grow at a finer street-by-street scale, while embracing the poetics of larger infrastructural systems and global networks.
We envision the fufture of D.C. as a thriving ecology of multiple sites. These sites are already embedded in the messy urban, suburban, and coastal fabric of DC. They provide a framework for interconnectivity and opportunity. They engage a series of ecologies and landscapes that could be industrious and working places, productive landscapes that could yield innovative, creative and cultural change.?
Competitors were given one week to assemble a three-dimensional design that is representative of their vision for the city. The finalists for D.C. presented their projects to the judges and the public at Union Station on January 15th where a team from the firm Beyer Blinder Belle was named the winner.
For additional information, see the Washington Post’s article 01/16/08: "Visions of a Brave New Washington", by Michael Ruane.
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