Sponsor: LA+ Journal; Penn Design Type: Open, International, Ideas Location: New York City Language: English Eligibility: Open to students and professionals of any discipline. Entries may be made by individuals and teams of up to three (3) people. Fee: USD $60 Awards: US $20,000 total prize money • 5 winners to receive US$4,000, a certificate, and publication in LA+ Journal’s LA+ ICONOCLAST issue • 10 honorable mentions to receive a certificate and publication in LA+ Journal’s LA+ ICONOCLAST issue Timeline: 10 October 2018 – Submission Deadline 27 November 2018 – Winners announced
Jury: • Richard Weller – Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania • Jenny B. Osuldsen – Partner and director of Snøhetta • Charles Waldheim – John E. Irving Professor and Director, Office for Urbanization at Harvard University Graduate School of Design • Lola Sheppard – Founding partner of Lateral Office and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada • Geoff Manaugh – Freelance writer, author of the New York Times-bestselling book A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016), and former director of Studio-X NYC • Beatrice Galilee – Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York
Design Challenge:
LA+ ICONOCLAST asks you to redesign New York’s Central Park, which has been fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists.
Central Park is arguably the canonical work of modern landscape architecture. Its aesthetic and socio-political ideals of health, beauty and democracy underpin the profession of landscape architecture, which Olmsted first named, to this day. Writing of the park in 1973, the artist Robert Smithson claimed that Olmsted “combined both art and reclamation in Central Park in a way that is truly in advance of his times.” But what would Olmsted do today? What will you do?
This competition asks that you redesign Central Park, starting, as Olmsted and Calvert Vaux did, from scratch. In doing so this competition seeks to explore the following questions: 1) If in parks, no matter how faux or superficial, we manifest a collective aesthetic expression of our relationship with the “natural” world, then what, on the occasion of nature’s disappearance, is the aesthetic of that relationship today? 2) What is the role of a large urban park today? 3) How might issues of aesthetics on the one hand and performance on the other coalesce into what Olmsted described as “a single work of art”? 4) Given the extraordinary history of the Central Park site, the competition asks how the new interprets the old, and how together, the new and the old anticipate the future.
In short, the brief is to create the concept for a new, 21st century Central Park. The brief asks for a plan, a short explanatory text, and discretionary supporting imagery. The competition favors conceptual rigor and imagination, and places a premium on engagement with the questions outlined above. Basic issues of feasibility, materiality, circulation, and programming will also be taken into consideration by the jury.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.
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