Earlier this month, the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction announced its global jury for the international design competition, making now a fitting time to revisit the top trio of North American projects up for the prize.
Run by an independent initiative created by the Swiss cement giant Holcim, the awards celebrate “innovative, future-oriented, and tangible construction projects” that have not yet been built (although many use the awards to spur actual construction.) The jury uses ‘target issue’ criteria referred to as the five Ps: progress, people, planet, prosperity, and place. Among the 15 finalist projects vying for the prize are three located in the United States—the Gold, Silver, and Bronze winners of the North American regional awards division, which took place earlier this year.
The Gold winner was Poreform—a design concept by Amy Mielke and Caitlin Gucker-Kanter Taylor (Water Pore Partnership) for Las Vegas that seeks to reposition water infrastructure as civic project for a desert city that occasionally faces floods due to local drainage systems incapable of handling storms. The material is a porous concrete surface poured in place with fabric formwork; it is designed to absorb water, feeding rain runoffs into underground basins with a capacity of more than 75,000 ML (20 billion gal). Capable of rapid saturation and slow release, the pores of this “urban skin” are inlets to a new infrastructure that “reframes water as a valuable resource rather than a liability.”
For Las Vegas, the Poreform concept would be calibrated to absorb the rainwater, which would then be captured and released from a primary basin beneath the downtown area. When dry, this subterranean space would also serve as a venue for exhibitions and performances. Once the storms hit, the tank would keep the downtown from flooding, while still offering the public above a visible way to understand water management.
The next contender for the global prize also deals with a city’s relationship with water, but in a different way. The BIG U is an urban flood protection infrastructure concept for New York City, envisioned by a large team that includes Danish architect—and former Construct keynote speaker—Bjarke Ingels. Winner of the North American Silver award, this project involves a defending ‘ribbon,’ wrapped around Lower Manhattan to safeguard the city against the effects of storms like 2012’s Hurricane Sandy. However, it is not a monolithic wall, but rather a series of small-scale solutions designed for each local community. It was billed as merging “the requirements of a Robert Moses type of hard infrastructure with the local community-driven sensitivity of Jane Jacobs.”
The BIG U master plan would be executed in several phases, using a raised berm strategically to create a sequence of public spaces along the raised bank. This barrier would incorporate a range of neighborhood functions, fostering local commercial, recreational, and cultural activities. The three major components are:
- BIG Bench—continuous protective element adapted to local spaces and designed like street furniture;
- Battery—a protective landscape anchored by an iconic museum; and
- Berm—rising 4 m (13 ft), it caps the highways, allowing a parkscape to connect coast and community with harbor paths and greenways.
The third U.S. project up for a global Holcim award is Hy-Fi—a zero-carbon-emissions, compostable structure designed by David Benjamin (The Living architecture lab).
Designed for and commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) PS1 Young Architects Program, the project is a cluster of circular towers formed using organic and reflective bricks. The first type of units comes from a combination of corn stalks and fungal organisms; they are carbon-free and produce almost no waste at the end of the building’s lifecycle. The reflective bricks, on the other hand, are produced through custom-forming of a new daylighting mirror film. The reflective bricks are used as growing trays for the organic bricks, and then incorporated into the final construction.
The structure inverts the logic of load-bearing brick construction and creates a gravity-defying effect by being thin and porous at the bottom. The overall design is calibrated to create a cool micro-climate in the summer by drawing in cool air at the bottom and pushing out hot air at the top.
The trio of projects will join 12 others around the planet in the competition, which is expected to be announced in May. For the global awards, the Gold, Silver, and Bronze status comes with respective prizes of $200,000, $100,000, and $50,000. To see all contenders, visit www.holcimfoundation.org/Awards/global-holcim-awards-2015/finalists.
