Analysis of Professional Finalists

(see analysis in comments section)

Update: All the boards are posted now on WPA website! I've linked the titles to the Boards on the CityLab site, and the firms names to their website. Great stuff, and none of it is out of our reach if we stay focused, bold, and fearless.

P1014 Urban Algae: Speculation and Optimization
Mining Existing Infrastructure for Lost Efficiencies

Proposal location: applicable nationwide to tollbooths, coal-fired power plants, automobile tunnels and other locations of CO2 production; main sample project is a Brooklyn to Manhattan pier/bridge armature

Primary issues: This proposal seeks to turn negative byproducts of auto use and coal-fired energy (CO2) into ecological, economic, and social opportunities. Three site types are targeted - toll booths, coal-fired power plants, and automobile tunnels. The team's design for a pivoting, pier-like, armature between Red Hook, Brooklyn and the Battery in Lower Manhattan not only captures the CO2 from the underwater auto tunnel, encouraging photosynthesis and alternative fuel production using algae pontoons, but also creates new public spaces (swimming pools, boardwalks, and plazas) and new locations for ecological or agricultural development including controlled wetlands and fish habitats.

TEAM: PORT

P1117 Coupling Infrastructures: Water Economies/Ecologies

Proposal location: case studies include Salton Sea, Mono Lake, and Owens Lake in California and Pyramid Lake in Nevada yet proposal is applicable to numerous locations, particularly in the southwest.

Primary issues: This proposal focuses on America's impending water crisis, particularly in cities in the southwest where growth is high and water availability is limited, by rethinking water use, distribution, and storage. Using the Salton Sea as a model site, the proposal envisions "converting the Sea back to its recreational use while allowing multiple economic opportunities for the production of water, salt, and more efficient greenhouses." Here "infrastructure [becomes] an extension of nature." Island pods provide for salt harvesting, recreation, and new animal habitats.

TEAM: Lateral Office/Infranet Lab

P1145 Border Wall as Infrastructure

Proposal location: US/Mexico border

Primary issues: "[T]here exists far more potential in a construction project that is estimated to cost up to $1,325.75 per linear foot." Recognizing the high cost, limited effectiveness and unintended natural consequences of the new, multi-layered US/Mexico border wall (disruption of animal habitats, diversion of water runoff that has caused new flooding in nearby towns), this proposal names 30 alternatives (covering nearly the whole of the Mexican alphabet, literally from Aqueduct wall to Zen wall) that might better combat the energy crisis, risk of death from dehydration, disruption of animal habitat, loss of vegetation, negative labor relations, missing creative vision and lack of cross-cultural appreciation likely in the government sponsored version.

TEAM: Rael San Fratello Architects

P1155 1,000,000,000 Global Water Refugees

Proposal location: Great Lakes Region

Primary issues: Combining the rust belts' loss of population with its abundance of fresh water, this proposal outlines a strategy for redensification of under-utilized post-industrial landscapes (parts of Milwaukee, Buffalo, Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland) by relocating populations threatened by water scarcity.

TEAM: UrbanLab

P1168 HYDRO-GENIC CITY, 2020

Proposal location: Los Angeles, with other possible urban applications

Primary Issues: Through the development of integrated, ecologically sensitive, and aesthetically compelling architecture, this proposal seeks to turn the often mechanistic infrastructural system of LA - in this case, the waterworks - into an interactive and sensory series of public nodes. As mist platforms/light rail stations, urban beaches, energy producing water treatment plants, solar-panel encased water towers, pools, and aquatic parking lots, these water-based landscapes become organizational moments for community building.

TEAM: Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono

P2001 Local Code: Healing the Interstitial Landscape

Proposal location: San Francisco, with secondary applications, per the proposal, in New Orleans, Seattle, and New York City

Primary issues: Tapping into the Department of Public Works catalogue of San Francisco's "unaccepted streets" (those no longer maintained by the city and hence neglected and often impassable), this proposal utilizes various computer models and statistical data to determine and propose new public, park-based uses for these interstitial spaces. Over 1600 of these sites are available, a selection of which are analyzed for the proposal in terms of elevation and topography, microclimate, soil type, hydrology, population density and demographics, economics, crime, and existing networks to determine the most parametrically appropriate transformation of use.

TEAM: Nicholas de Monchaux & Associates