Architecture-Business Team Honored in North American Competition
A team of UO landscape architecture, architecture and business administration students placed in the top 11 in an urban design competition that drew 153 entries from the United States and Canada for a project in Seattle. More than 700 students representing 60 universities competed for $80,000 in prizes. The UO team’s submission was singled out for its excellence in sustainability focused on rain and graywater re-use.
“It’s the year of the champions” at UO, noted landscape architecture assistant professor Deni Ruggeri, who advised the winning team. It was the first year a UO team entered the competition, now in its ninth year. The ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition asks graduate students to form multidisciplinary teams for an exercise in responsible land use. Teams of five students comprising three disciplines had just 15 days to devise a design and development program for a 33-acre site in Seattle. Submissions comprised drawings, site plans, tables, and financial data.
“Being about urban design and financial feasibility, it’s one of the rare opportunities for a dialogue across disciplines,” Ruggeri said. “That’s what I love about it—rarely do you have MBA and design students working together.”
Team members and their degree programs include Roberto Bio, master’s of landscape architecture; Andy Fenstermacher, master’s of business administration; Vanessa Nevers, master’s of landscape architecture and master’s of architecture; Brian Rajotte, master’s of business administration; and Lauren Schwartz, master’s of landscape architecture and master’s of business administration.
This year’s competition problem asked how a site in an economically and ethnically diverse Seattle neighborhood could capitalize on its new light rail station. The proposal needed to be sensitive and appropriate, and it had to pencil out.
The UO team’s entry, “Water Scapes,” won an honorable mention (one of seven): ”For Comprehensive Thinking about the Water Cycle.” The honorable mention categories did not exist prior to judging but were “individual projects that the jury members felt stood out,” ULI spokesman Robert Krueger said.
Although in his first year at UO, Ruggeri had worked with student teams in the ULI competition for three years while teaching at Cornell. He learned from those competitions that “a big idea” was critical to winning. “My role was to be keeper of this big idea” while the students made it happen. He offered “comments on the design, like would it be a livable neighborhood,” but gave no specifics.
“Water was the one (concept) that made more sense and allowed for stronger design opportunities,” Bio said. “We thought that the design should represent a big idea that fits in a context. Seattle means rainwater, and buildings produce a lot of gray water that can be used. It also helped that for my master’s project I am focusing on generating electricity from storm water.”
The School’s renown for sustainable design factored into the equation; the UO’s departments of architecture and interior architecture both ranked first nationwide in 2011 for their sustainable design practices and principles curricula.
“I think we knew from the beginning that sustainability would be a fundamental aspect of whatever design concept we went with,” Nevers said.
The team’s disadvantage at the outset was that they were total strangers. Ruggeri had organized a “speed dating” event for potential team members to meet, and teams self-selected from that.
At Cornell, Ruggeri had taught a weekly workshop specifically intended to foster entries for the ULI competition. He didn’t have time to organize that at UO this year, so “it was amazing they did so well because they didn’t really know each other.”
Students had a month to prepare for the competition’s official kick-off, Jan. 17, when details of the competition were released and the fifteen-day competition clock began ticking.
Fenstermacher, who has a master’s in urban planning from the University of Washington, strategized the GIS phasing and mapping. The finance team recommended project phasing, zoning, and square footage. “Being realistic about costs versus revenues narrowed the scope of the project ideals,” Rajotte said, but also “allowed for a more focused design.”
Bio and Nevers produced most of the graphics, with Schwartz serving as an intermediary between the design and finance teams, a role that proved crucial.
“There were times when the linear and cyclical thinkers clashed,” Schwartz said, “so being able to mediate and show that in reality they were saying the same thing was very helpful.”
Fenstermacher echoed this sentiment. “We definitely started to notice a difference between the work process of MBAs and design students. The most obvious was that the MBAs wanted to really crunch the numbers and get a solid grasp on the project before putting pencil to paper. At times this clashed with the design students who were definitely more eager to start drawing. It took a few days to overcome this learning curve, but eventually we figured out how to work effectively with each other.”
Being able to work on interdisciplinary teams “reflects the practice in our field,” Ruggeri noted. “Whether they won or not, I was interested in the dialogue that would result” from the blended-team approach.
Along with being thrown together literally overnight, the other thorny aspect of the competition was its compressed time frame.
“It was more fast paced and intensely focused that I could have ever imagined,” Schwartz said of the 24/7 days for two weeks.
“Roberto and I worked till 4 a.m. almost every night, sometimes even later,” Nevers added. “I had two hours of sleep a night for the entire two weeks—I think I lived primarily off of caffeine. By the end of the competition I was completely delirious.”
Both design and business teammates felt they gained insight into how each other thinks, and how that will translate to the workplace.
“This competition showed how everyone has a different process and a way of working,” Schwartz said, “It was like making a puzzle with different people making different pieces. Everyone made their part in their own way but in the end each piece fit together to make a complete picture.“
Nevers said the competition validated her choice of career. “It's fantastic to give so much of yourself and to achieve recognition for your efforts,” she noted. “It's not often that we get rewarded for what we love in life and I feel fortunate to be doing what I'm doing. It makes me feel like I'm on the right track.”
The competition is funded through a $3 million endowment from Gerald D. Hines, chairman and owner of the Hines real estate organization. Co-sponsor The Urban Land Institute is a nonprofit organization with members in 95 countries.
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