Teams of landscape architecture, architecture, and business students around the country have spent an intense 15 days working on an urban design proposal for downtown Houston, Texas as a part of a yearly urban design competition. Here at the UO, two teams of five students each have submitted their work with the hopes of becoming finalists and the eventual winners.
The ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition asks graduate students to form multidisciplinary teams for an exercise in responsible land use. Submissions comprised drawings, site plans, tables, diagrams, and financial data. On the week of February 20th, teams will find out if the jury selected their entries to be amongst the four finalists. The finalists will then get a chance to revise and enhance their proposals before a winner is chosen in April.
Looking back at the 15-day process, participants were still exhausted by all of the work they put in. “We knew that we were going to have evenings free and from five o’clock on for every day in the competition, and we were meeting until ten, midnight, one, four…” says graduate architecture student Jamie Corsaro.
Last year, the team from the UO won an honorable mention for their entry “Water Scapes,” but this year teams hope to best that effort. Last year was also the first year a team from the UO participated, and they’re using the experience to become more prepared this time around. Interested students met with faculty advisor and landscape architecture assistant professor Deni Ruggeri in the fall to review past winning entries to critique them and take lessons.
“The early meetings were really helpful because they gave you an idea of what this was all about,” says Vanessa Walton, graduate landscape architecture student. “A lot of them were talking about broad, interesting urban design ideas and how to finish the project in a short time period.”
During the 15-day design sprint, teams got critiques from a variety of landscape architecture and architecture professors. Ruggeri used his experience as an advisor last year and his three years of experience advising students through the ULI competition when he taught at Cornell.
Students learned about urban design, but also about how to approach a contest and communicate an idea effectively in a limited amount of space. Teams had to fit all of their work on six 11”x17” panels, so brevity and clarity were key. “What we spent more time producing was these conceptual diagrams that would explain how we were solving the problem,” says Lydia Chambers, graduate architecture student. “That was way harder than developing a plan, section, or a perspective.”
Participants also had the opportunity to work with students from other disciplines collaboratively. Each team consisted of two architecture students, two landscape architecture students, and one business student.
One team consisted of architecture graduate students Jamie Corsaro and Lydia Chambers, landscape architecture graduate students Vanessa Walton and Carol Stafford, and James Collins, MBA student. The other consisted of architecture graduate students Heather Ferrell and Lee Jorgensen, graduate landscape architecture students Shannon Arms and Emilie Froh, and MBA student Jaxon Love.
Working with business students gave the others grounding in the financial reality of their urban design schemes. But even the cross-disciplinary work between architecture and landscape architecture students was unique. “It was really great to work with Lydia and Jamie and so interesting to see how everyone comes from a slightly different place but then we all get to the same goal,” says Walton.
So now teams must wait until the week of February 20th to see if they’ve made it to the final round. Win or lose, the participants will always have the skills and memories gained during their harried two-week design adventure.
“It was one of the best learning experiences I’ve had within the program,” says Heather Ferrell, graduate architecture student. “I really enjoyed learning from my peers, working as a team, and the distilled design process. We had a three-scheme day, involving two reviews with four different professors. It was nuts and I can’t wait to do another one.”