Coming Soon To Vacant Lots in St. Louis: Chess, Farming, Sunflower Rehab
A restaurant made from shipping containers was among the winners. (Courtesy Sustainable Land Lab)
The winners of St. Louis’ first-ever “Sustainable Land Lab” competition, put on by Washington University and city officials, attempted to make the most of a regrettably abundant resource: vacant lots.
Local architects took top honors in a competition that garnered some four dozen submissions. Each winner gets a two-year lease on a North St. Louis vacant lot and $5,000 in seed money to realize their ideas. Five winning projects will share four lots (two finalist teams combined their proposals into one new plan) across the city.
Washington University in St. Louis will soon begin work on two major projects totaling $130 million, according to NextSTL. St. Louis’ Hastings+Chivetta will design the $120 field house expansion, an extensive addition to Washington University’s historic field house, built out from the 1903 Francis gymnasium. Clayton, MO-based Ottolino Winters Huebner will design a $10 million cyclotron, a particle accelerator used for medical imaging and for the synthesis of radioisotopes for pharmaceutical production. The university’s Dr. Michel Ter-Pogossian is considered the father of positron emission tomography (PET scans), a nuclear medical imaging technique that produces 3-D images of internal body processes. (Rendering: Hastings+Chivetta)
Notes from The Innovative Metropolis: Fostering Economic Competitiveness Through Sustainable Urban Design
Left to right: Robert Puentes, Senior Fellow & Director, Metropolitan Infrastructure Initiative, The Brookings Institution; Oliver Schulze, Principal of Schulze + Grassov (Copenhagen); Chandra Brown, president of United Streetcar (Portland); and Jonathan Solomon, Associate Dean and Associate Professor, Syracuse University (Hong Kong). (Sharon Farmer/sfphotoworks)
Covering ground from Sao Paulo to Copenhagen, a set of multi-disciplinary discussions were convened in Washington, DC yesterday by the Brookings Institution and the Sam Fox School at Washington University in St. Louis, to explore the synergies between urban design, policy, and finance required to realize innovation in the way we construct our environment. The discussions focused on global case studies relative to urban mobility, technology, and environmental adaptation, against the backdrop of global urbanization and climate change.
While lessons were gleamed, it was clear that what was needed was “not one urbanism,” as Dean Moshen Mostafavi of the Harvard GSD put it, but “Urbanisms,” tuned to the “logic” of a given geography, climate, and culture. While existing within larger ecologies that, as Valente Souza of Mexico City asserted, may contain “their own solutions,” cites are, as Amy Liu of the Brookings Institution emphasized “complex economic systems” and any sustainable initiatives must address consumer demands. As Alex Washburn, Chief Urban designer for New York City summarized, “all change is driven by desire.”
Watch videos of the proceedings of “The Innovative Metropolis” on the Brookings Institution website.
Obit>Udo Kultermann, 1927-2013
Udo Kultermann (courtesy Washington University, St. Louis)
Udo Kultermann, who was born in Germany, died in New York City on February 9, 2013 at the age of 85. An internationally-known art historian, scholar, author, and lecturer, Kultermann spent nearly 30 years as a professor of art and architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to his work at Washington University, Kultermann, who received his Ph.D. from the University of Muenster, served as the director of the City Art Museum in Leverkusen, Germany. Kultermann wrote more than 35 books on a wide range of subjects, many of which have been translated into various languages. Read More
Steedman Fellowship Winner Heralded for Interdisciplinary Design
Jason Mrdeza's winning proposal features a first floor "mound" fitted with a green roof and topped with five glowing "lantern blocks" containing studios and offices. (Courtesy Washington University)
Canadian/Norwegian architect Jason Mrdeza has won Washington University in Saint Louis’ 2012 Steedman Fellowship in Architecture International Design Competition. Sponsored by the College of Architecture and the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, the biennial competition is open to young architects from around the world within the first eight yeas of practice. The winner receives a $50,000 prize, one of the largest competition prizes in the U.S., to support study and research abroad. Mrdeza’s winning project, “Mediating Adjacencies: Inspiring Collaboration within Context,” was chosen out of 120 entrees.
Sukkah STL: A Contemporary Twist on Ancient Tradition
60 Degree Sukkah by Filip Tejchman
Ten Sukkahs—small temporary structures built for the Jewish festival of Sukkot—will be on display at Washington University in St. Louis. The ten winning projects, by architects and designers from across the country, were chosen out of a group of 40 competition entries. Sukkot recognizes the struggle of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt, and Sukkahs recall the fragile structures they inhabited.
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