2011 AIA Institute Honor Awards - Regional and Urban Design

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected the 2011 recipients of the Institute Honor Awards, the profession’s highest recognition of works that exemplify excellence in architecture, interior architecture and urban design.

Following are the six winning projects in the category "Regional and Urban Design":

Beijing CBD East Expansion; Beijing, China
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP

Located in the heart of Beijing, the Central Business District (CBD) has emerged over the past decade as China's primary global business address and is now poised for an eastward expansion that will almost double its size. Winner of an invited international design competition, the CBD Eastern Expansion Plan defines opportunities for the growth of commerce, industry, culture and the arts by establishing a flexible framework for growth and an environmentally sustainable approach to 21st Century city design.

Chicago Central Area DeCarbonization Plan; Chicago
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture

The project team developed a database (energy use, size, age, use, and estimated carbon footprint) of more than 550 buildings. The team used that database, tied to a 3-D model, to develop the DeCarbonization Plan, which interweaves energy engineering, architecture and urban design. In the DeCarbonization Plan's synergistic approach, eight key strategies work together with a parametric model.

Community | City: Between Building and Landscape. Affordable Sustainable Infill for Smoketown; Louisville, Kentucky
Marilys R. Nepomechie, FAIA; Marilys R. Nepomechie Architect + Florida International University and Marta Canavés, ASLA, IIDA; Marta Canavés Design + Florida International University

This project remediates existing brownfields and re-activates a long-neglected connection among an African American residential neighborhood, an historic Olmsted park, and the Ohio Riverfront. By introducing a range of housing typologies, social service spaces, and new collective green spaces, it fills gaps in an existing 19th century neighborhood fabric, increasing density while sensitively reinforcing its historic urban structure. The project re-activates long-neglected interstitial neighborhood spaces to produce a newly robust public realm.

Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™; New York City
dlandstudio llc

The Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™ is a public open space system that slows, absorbs and filters surface water runoff with the goal of remediating contaminated water, activating the private canal waterfront, and revitalizing the neighborhood. The total proposed area for the Gowanus Canal Sponge Park™ system is 11.4 acres: 7.9 acres of esplanade and recreational open spaces, and 3.5 acres of remediation wetland basins. The most unique feature of the park is its character as a working landscape: its ability to improve the environment of the canal over time while simultaneously supporting public engagement with the canal ecosystem.

Low Impact Development: a design manual for urban areas
University of Arkansas Community Design Center

The 230-page publication, “Low Impact Development: a design manual for urban areas” is designed for use by those involved in urban development, from homeowners, to institutions, developers, designers, cities, and regional authorities. Low Impact Development (LID) is an ecologically-based stormwater management approach favoring soft engineering to manage rainfall on site through a vegetated treatment network. The objective is to sustain a site’s pre-development hydrological regime by using techniques that infiltrate, filter, store, and evaporate stormwater runoff close to its source.
 

Townscaping an Automobile-Oriented Fabric; Farmington, Arkansas
University of Arkansas Community Design Center

Once a vibrant farming community, central to one of the nation’s largest strawberry and apple-producing regions in the early 1900s, Farmington is now a bedroom community. Unlike the totalizing pattern of a master plan, townscaping employs a serial organization of nodes to create a walkable urban environment within an automobile-oriented fabric. The townscape plan for Farmington integrates multiple placemaking strategies in: 1) context-sensitive highway design, 2) public art planning, and 3) agricultural urbanism. Placemaking in the townscape vocabulary offers a strategic pedestrianization of automobile-oriented patterns without denying the automobile’s fundamental role in servicing contemporary development.

 

The jury for the 2011 Institute Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design includes: Daniel Williams, FAIA, (chair), Daniel Williams Architect; C.R. George Dove, FAIA, WDG Architecture, PLLC; Vivien Li, Boston Harbor Association; Claire Weisz, AIA, Weisz + Yoes Architecture and Bernard Zyscovich, FAIA, Zyscovich, Inc.