Drylands Design Winners Announced

The California Architectural Foundation has announced the winners of the William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition. On Friday, January 13th, the jury met at Woodbury University to review 205 submissions and select 9 awards:

Students:
Merit Award $1250
#T271 Chau Nguyen, Cal Poly Pomona and Orange Coast College
Local Urban Farming: Fresno Reimagined

Honor Award $2500
#T159 Rebecca Lederer, University of Pennsylvania
New Man’s Land: 14 Sister Cities Along the US-Mexico Border

Professionals:
Merit Award $1250
#T097 Geeti Silwal, AICP, San Francisco
Resource Infinity Loop: Watershed Urbanism in San Francisco

Honor Award $2500
#T020 Thomas Kosbau, Ore Design, Brooklyn, NY
LA20: Large Scale Desalination with Repurposed Civic Infrastructure

Research Award Winners: $10,000 each
In addition to the William Turnbull Prizes, the design jury also selected five projects for further development. Working in partnership with ALI and UCLA’s Institute of the Environment, research award-winners will work to advance each proposal technically and to tease public policy implications from them. In March, award-winners will present their design research and the policy implications they suggest at ALI’s Drylands Design Conference (March 22-24, 2012).

#T178 Meghan Storm, University of Pennsylvania; Ellen Neises, advisor
Off the Reservation: A Seed for Change

#T016 Gini Lee, with Brooke Madill, University of Melbourne
Reinvesting the Line:
Small infrastructures, micro-communities, and communication ecologies

#T249 Robert Lamb, AIA; Los Angeles
Silver Lake Microshed

#T161 Laurel McSherry, Virginia Tech; and Robert Holmes, architectural designer
Drylands Design: The Commonwealth Approach

#T218 Ye Hua, USC; Alex Robinson, advisor
A Colorful Walk: Salt Pool Exploration, Owens Valley

We are looking forward to working with the research award winners over the next sixty days and sharing the results of their work, and the competition as a whole, in March. We hope you will join us.

Look for an online gallery of competition entries shortly.

Registration for the conference opens on Monday, January 30.

Drylands Design Competition Jury Meets 1/13/2012

ALI is grateful to the California Architectural Foundation, the outreach arm of the AIA/California Council, for joining with us to explore the challenges of good design for a water-scarce west. We are honored by the magnitude of the response generated by the 2011 William Turnbull Drylands Design Competition.

Three hundred teams—half of them professional, half academic; representing 29 states and 12 countries—registered for the competition. Two hundred five entries were submitted by December 15th, 2011. Teams put forth proposals for radical new building types, insurgent infrastructures, and remade landscapes, from Lubbock to Salt Lake City, from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, Denver to San Diego, Yuma to eastern Washington.

Tomorrow, Friday, January 13, the design jury meets at Woodbury to finalize their selections for 9 awards: 5 research awards, two honor awards, and two merit awards. Announcements will be made on January 17th, and selected projects will form the basis of an exhibition and conference opening in March.

Details to follow, but for now, we simply want to say: Hats Off. In a landscape of scarcity, design teams have shown us an abundance of possibility. Thank you, and all the best for 2012.

Hadley + Peter Arnold
co-directors/ALI

Video Now Online: Thinking Water_A Briefing for Designers

Video from Thinking Water: Water, Energy, and Climate Challenges Facing the U.S. West_A Briefing for Designers, a half-day seminar and briefing for designers on the critical water challenges facing the U.S. West is now available.

The future of development across the western United States is intricately linked to the availability of water. A precious, but often overlooked and misunderstood resource, water impacts policy, the environment, and economics. Addressing these issues, a team of scientists and researchers from UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability presented findings, briefed attendees, and answered questions on water, energy, climate change, and strategic design opportunities for a water-smart future.

For more information: please see: http://aridlands.woodbury.edu/public_programs/thinking_water_2011.html

Presentation: Thinking Water_PART II: A Briefing for Designers

Thinking Water_Part II: Water, Energy, and Climate Challenges Facing the U.S. West: A Briefing for Designers, hosted by the Arid Lands Institute in partnership with UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability (IoES) is a half-day seminar and briefing for designers on the critical water challenges facing the U.S. West.

To register, send us an email: info.aridlands@woodbury.edu

The future of development across the western United States is intricately linked to the availability of water. A precious, but often overlooked and misunderstood resource, water impacts policy, the environment, and economics. Addressing these issues, a team of scientists and researchers from UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability will present findings, brief attendees, and answer questions on water, energy, climate change, and strategic design opportunities for a water-smart future.

Thinking Water_Part II: Water, Energy, and Climate Challenges Facing the US West: A Briefing for Designers is part of ALI’S 2011-2012 Drylands Design Initiative. The event support architects, landscape architects, engineers, urban designers, and students participating in the William Turnbull, Jr. Drylands Design Competition, an international competition seeking progressive design strategies for low-carbon, localized water systems.

The event is free and open to the public.

For more information: aridlands.woodbury.edu/public_programs/thinking_water_2011.html

To register, send us an email: info.aridlands@woodbury.edu

Fall 2011: CALL FOR ENTRIES + UPCOMING BRIEFING

Registration is open for the Drylands Design Competition until November 15th. Entries are due December 15th, and six winners will be selected in mid-January. Winners will develop and present their proposals at the March 2012 Drylands Design Conference, and will be exhibited in a traveling exhibition launching from Los Angeles’s A+D Museum.

Register now, and attend the briefing on Saturday October 29th. Briefing details can be found here: 10.29 Thinking water event.v2

To register, send us an email: info.aridlands@woodbury.edu

October 2011: Monterey Design Conference + Thinking Water, Part 2

Our AIA/California Council and CAF partners invited us to deliver a Continuing Ed Session as part of this year’s Monterey Design Conference. We expected 20 to 30 people, and 80 showed up. That gives us a strong indication of the hunger out there in the design professions for more information on: what, exactly, does water have to do with practicing architecture in the US West?

As part of our extended effort to answer that very question, we are offering a great 1/2-day seminar on Saturday October 29th, 2011. UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability is joining with us to provide a briefing by scientists, for designers. Topics to be addressed are the central challenges of the drylands design competition brief: untying the water/energy nexus; anticipating climate change impacts; maximizing local resources; and constructing systems that sustain social equity.

Please join us on Saturday, October 29th, 9:30 am to 12:30 pm, Ahmanson Main Space, Woodbury University Burbank.
All presentations will be videotaped and uplaoded to ALI’s video archive within one week. Here’s the full program:
10.29 Thinking water event.v2

September 2011: Land Heritage Institute, San Antonio, Texas

Penelope Boyer of the Land Heritage Institute invited us to be part of a wonderful weekend in water-starved San Antonio. As part of a benefit event on Friday evening September 2nd, ALI projected film, video, and slides of field work onto the concrete flood control embankments and the mirror-flat surface of the San Antonio River, while a groovy band called Buttercup filled the bend in the river with great music. Saturday’s symposium focussed on “Land as Lab”—a “confab” of artists, scientists, activists, and researchers using the environment as exploratory sites for their work. ALI gave an informal keynote on lessons from the field. Architect Mark Oppelt and the LHI organizers made us welcome with a chile feast and an archeological tour of the site, and we enjoyed connecting with other presenters, particularly Nancy Zastudil of PLAND/Tres Piedras, NM and Jennifer Monson of iLAND/Urbana, IL.

On a different note: HUD published a short piece in The Edge, their online magazine of policy development and research, featuring ALI’s work in New Mexico.

August 2011: Semester of Water Kick-Off

ALI was honored and delighted that Woodbury University School of Architecture adopted water issues as the focus topic of the Fall Semester. Studios and seminars throughout the School issued ambitious design challenges to students, ranging from contaminated groundwater remediation sites to wetland restoration, from urban creek daylighting projects to transborder water conflicts. Faculty leading the charge include Jose Parral, Linda Taalman, Anthony Fontenot, Clark Stevens, Deborah Richmond, Jennifer Bonner. Woodbury San Diego “warmed up” their fall semester’s “Barrio Scenario” with an all-school workshop resulting in the transformation of back alleys and a side courtyard on the campus. Watch the fun here.

We are encouraged, and honored, to learn that schools around CA, the West, and the US have also taken on the drylands design competition brief as a basis for Fall studios

July 2011: Community Design Presentations/Dixon, NM

A student GIS team led by undergraduates Eric Arm and Rana Ahmadi produced extensive analysis of the acequias of the Lower Embudo Valley. Advanced analytic modelling showed where critical challenges, from erosion to invasive species to neglect of easements, threaten the functioning of several ditches, and suggest strategic locations for intervention. Students and farmers discussed the challenges, the opportunities for addressing them, and agreed to a multi-pronged approach to be developed over the course of Fall 2011 for further review and discussion. For a short clip of the students celebrating completion of their eight-mile, high-resolution survey of Acequia del Llano, check out our facebook site.

March 2011: Excavating Innovation Series Concludes

The Excavating Innovation lecture series, sponsored in part by the Metropolitan Water District’s Community Partners Program, concluded in March. Nan Ellin, Chair of City + Metropolitan Planning at University of Utah, presented her Canalscape scheme, and the methods of civic engagement behind it, for integrating ancient and contemporary infrastructures in dynamic public spaces in Phoenix. Dilip da Cunha and Vinayak Bharne shared an evening of discussions on the logics of indigenous infrastructures in Iran, India, and the American Southwest. All lectures from the series, which also included Katherine Rinne, Morna Livingstone, Aziza Chaouni, and Liat Margolis, are video archived.

In the March issue of Architect, the magazine of the American Institute of Architects, Mark Lamster published a piece called, “The Future Belongs to Woodbury,” recognizing Woodbury School of Architecture’s track record as a Hispanic-serving institution and some of the educational innovations it has put forward, including ALI.