Winners of the 2009 Cleveland Design Competition: Lakefront Station

The Cleveland Design Competition recently announced the winners of the third annual competition - Project 2009: Lakefront Station - Ideas for a 21st Century Multi-Modal Transportation Facility.

Project 2009: Lakefront Station is an international, single-stage ideas competition for a new multi-modal transportation center in Downtown Cleveland between the historic Mall and Lake Erie. Designs for this new transportation center must provide the city with a state-of-the-art rail station ready to support high speed passenger rail service, a facility capable of integrating and balancing the needs of various transportation modes, and a significant pedestrian connection from the Mall to Cleveland’s lakefront. Linked into a High Speed Passenger Rail network, Downtown Cleveland will be an important midwest rail center among a network of connected American cities, a fitting gateway to Northeast Ohio.

Cleveland, Ohio, like urban centers throughout the United States, finds itself at the center of a variety of passenger rail planning proposals. Many of these planning initiatives have been spurred by the recent commitment and investment in rail infrastructure by the federal government. While details in these proposals vary in scope and timeline, all must appropriately consider their role in contributing to a complete national network of sustainable communities. By utilizing rail to strengthen connectivity, these new multi-modal transportation networks - and the facilities that serve them - will help reinforce the social and economic sustainability of the American City.

The 2009 Awards Jury includes an accomplished panel of architects, urban designers and planners with a breadth of transportation planning and design experience: Stanton Eckstut, Founding Principal of Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects (EEK); Vincent Chang, Principal at Grimshaw Architects; Mehrdad Yazdani, Principal at Cannon Design and Design Director of Yazdani Studio; Ann Pendleton-Jullian, Director of the Ann E. Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University; Robert Brown, Director of City of Cleveland Planning Commission. More information about each of the jurors can be found on the competition website.

Prizes are presented by the 2009 Awards Sponsor, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. Entries will be featured as part of a public exhibition and reception at the conclusion of the competition. The date for this Reception will be announced on the Competition Webiste.

Mario Caceres and Christian Canonico of France were awarded the $5,000 first prize for an “immensely compelling” solution that “suggested that the experience of movement could be humane and uplifting, a feature all too often neglected in recent transit centers.  The $2,500 second place prize was awarded to Pepijn Van Voorst from the Netherlands with the $1,000 third place prize awarded to Ruseel Collin of London.  This year, these five teams had submissions recognized as Noteworthy Projects for the interest and discourse generated at the juried review: Visvaldis Sarma of Latvia, Elina Kritikou and Kenzo Yamashita from Cypress, Greece, Ashley Dennis and Esan Rahmani of Syndey, Australia, Martina Decker and Kaja Kahl of New York NY, and Javier Guijarro Fayard and Annie Martinez-Pita of Madrid Spain.

The Cleveland Design Competition is co-founded and organized by architectural professionals Michael Christoff and Bradley Fink with the advisory support of Steve Rugare of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative and Greg Peckham of Cleveland Public Art. The annual Cleveland Design Competition is an open, anonymous, single-stage, ideas competition founded as a tool for generating ideas around under-utilized and high profile sites and exhibiting ideas from emerging designers on Cleveland’s built and unbuilt environment. In 2007, the Cleveland Design Competition saw registrations from 200 designs in 10 different countries. In 2008, over 230 individuals from 15 countries submitted entries. This year, over 80 teams submitted proposals; representing 16 different countries.The generous contributions of Partners and Sponsors that made the 2009 Cleveland Design Competition possible include: Competition Partner – Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative; 2009 Awards Sponsor - the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy; Platinum Sponsor – Cleveland Mall Plaza Beautification Fund.

The Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) is the combined home of Kent State University’s graduate program in urban design and the public service activities of the Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio (UDC). The CUDC provides real-world learning opportunities for Kent State students and allows the UDC staff to provide design services to the entire region served by Kent State’s eight campuses, with a particular emphasis on sustained relationships with Cleveland’s community development corporations and the network of non-profit organizations supporting them.

Following are the projects the jury honored with ‘Noteworthy Project’:

Images: Cleveland Design Competition