The Urban Land Institute announced the winners of its ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition last week. The winning team, made up of five students from the University of Colorado and Harvard University, took home a $50,000 prize.
The ULI/Hines competition encourages interdisciplinary collaboration among future land use professionals and those in allied fields. Some 695 students from 64 universities participated in this year’s contest, which required students to rethink a 16.3-acre property along the Buffalo Bayou near downtown Houston. The site was a distribution center for the U.S. Postal Service until it was closed in 2009 as part of the postal service’s financial restructuring.
The winning plan would extend SWA Group’s award-winning Buffalo Bayou Promenade west of Bagby Street and create a mixed-use neighborhood that takes advantage of the views. New office and residential towers would be connected to Houston’s Theater District by an iconic pedestrian bridge that terminates in a linear plaza. The plan was created by two master of landscape architecture students from Harvard, Michael Albert and Anna Cawrse; two pursuing their master’s of business administration in real estate at the University of Colorado, Chad Murphy and Alex Atherton; and an architecture student from Harvard, Victor Perez Amado. Kurt Culbertson and Todd Johnson of Design Workshop served as professional advisers to the students, and Anita Berrizbeitia, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard, served as their faculty adviser.
Curious how students two time zones apart ended up collaborating? Well, it turns out Murphy and Albert both worked at Design Workshop, which has a reputation for pushing its employees to get master’s degrees. You can see the students’ proposal, which is strongly grounded in the landscape, here.
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