A team of six University of Notre Dame School of Architecture graduate students earned second prize in a design competition sponsored by the Ed Bacon Foundation.
The award-winning entry, submitted by Keith Kirley, Cindy Michel, Leon Li, Zeke Balan, Clayton Vance and C.J. Howard, earned the team a $1,500 prize at a ceremony held Dec. 8 at the Center for Architecture in Philadelphia. The students proposed a mixed-use development for an existing brownfield site along the Schuylkill River south of the University of Pennsylvania campus.
“We worked to address several key issues," Kirley said, "including revitalizing the contaminated site and providing multiple points of access to the new riverfront park.”
The Philadelphia-based non-profit Ed Bacon Foundation is dedicated to preserving and strengthening the vision of the city's renowned planner, Edmund N. Bacon. This year’s competition, “Brown to Green: An Urban Sustainability Design Challenge,” required entrants to develop a sustainable solution for South Philadelphia's Grays Ferry Crescent industrial brownfield site.
The group produced a master plan, site analyses, a sustainable, walkable mixed-use design strategy, and generated hand-drafted, watercolor perspectives and elevations. The resulting plan included a riverfront park, residential, commercial and retail buildings, an outdoor theater, baseball field, recreational canal, and a large piazza surrounded by public buildings and a colonnaded open market area.
The award-winning submission boards are available for viewing on the Web at "http://nd.edu/~kkirley1/urban_design_gray.html":http://nd.edu/~kkirley1/urban_design_gray.html.
_*Contact:* Karen Voss, School of Architecture, "kvoss@nd.edu":mailto:kvoss@nd.edu, 574-631-2872_