University of Oregon Graduate Wins 2011 Cavin Family Traveling Fellowship

Daniel Toole, an architect at Perkins + Will in Seattle and a 2008 University of Oregon architecture graduate, has won the 5th Annual Cavin Family Traveling Fellowship award for his design, “Whittier Organic Food Center Towers,” a system that “flips” greenhouses vertically to incorporate on-site energy generation from wind and solar exposure, gravity-fed hydroponics, housing for students and farm laborers, and space for farmers’ markets.

On the 12-week, $10,000 fellowship, Toole will travel to 10 countries in Southern Europe and Scandinavia this summer to catalog climate-responsive models of urbanism, landscape and infrastructure in northern and southern Europe.

The jury praised Toole’s project as “a comprehensive solution with attention to keeping a small footprint.” Sustainable construction technologies, passive environmental control systems, recycled/renewable materials and finishes were critical criteria.

Toole’s intent was for “Whittier to become a catalyst for a new form of Southwestern urbanism, utilizing the land, a small footprint, the sun and the scarce water supply.” Besides being a state-of-the-art food production testing facility, the center “creates opportunity for social sustainability,” Toole says, by leasing areas for micro-agro business, storing crops for disaster relief, local distribution and sales, and housing an on-site food bank.

The Cavin Fellowship awards an architecture graduate or practitioner age 35 and younger $10,000 to advance their education through self-devised foreign travel-study. Toole will use his grant to document climate-responsive vernacular and contemporary urbanism in Scandinavia, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey.

All four 2011 Cavin Fellowship finalists were UO graduates. Besides Toole, the others were: Daniel Bittiker (’08, B.Arch) Noel Shamble (’08 M.Arch) and Ronald Spencer (’09, B.Arch). The Cavin Family Traveling Fellowship Fund was established in 2002 as part of the California Community Foundation.

Additionally, Toole opens an exhibit tomorrow May 11 at the AIA Gallery in Seattle that showcases his work from a previous travel grant. “Tight Urbanism” documents alleyway architecture in San Francisco, Chicago, Detroit, Australia and Japan. Toole developed the exhibit as recipient of the $5,000 AIA Seattle 2010 Emerging Professionals Travel Scholarship. The exhibit runs through July 1 at the gallery, 1911 1st Ave., Seattle.

Find Daniel Toole's winning competition boards in the image gallery below.