A city that is connected -- in all senses of the word -- is a good city. The finalists of the Dallas Connected City Design Challenge offered numerous solutions in how Downtown Dallas can be linked to the Trinity River.
To guarantee a variety of ideas for Dallas' future development, the competition invited submissions in a Professional Stream and an Open Stream. Three Professional and 4 Open entries won.
— bustler.net
Professional Stream finalists (selected by jury):
Stoss + SHoP, Boston, MA: "HyperDensity/HyperLandscape"
Ricardo Bofill Taller de Arquitectura, Barcelona, Spain: Dallas: "Downtown & Trinity"
OMA*AMO, New York, NY: "2Rivers/2Datums"
Open Stream finalists (selected by jury and public voting):
Kohki Hiranuma of Kohki Hiranuma Architect & Associates, Osaka, Japan: "Forest"
Bogdan Chipara of Constanta, Romania: Bridging
Raik Thonig and Marius Kreft of University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, Texas: "Baroque Forest"
McLain Clutter of University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan: "Incentive Network"
For more details, head over to Bustler.
6 Comments
Fantasyland bullshit. Is it possible to be creative and realistic? This is what you get when you solicit/receive submissions from academics.
What New York City said when someone suggested digging enormous TUNNELS under the ground and running TRAINS through them: fantasyland bullshit.
I love me a good budget-less proposal - completely divorced from private or public-sector realities that is destined to sit on shelf or more likely end up in an academic exhibit space. This is 20th century planning at its worst. Real progressive planning takes the realities of economics, policy, ecology, and place seriously to come up with creative solutions to real problems.
I hear you, won, and I totally agree.
But in addition: Do you give any merit to the argument that the public needs big, colorful, risky ideas to feel enough passion about a project to be willing to support it? And that politicians will then follow the excitement of the people?
In my town Bus Rapid Transit is, IMO, an excellent solution for what we need, and it takes economics, policy, etc. into account. But it's not as sexy as light rail, so it doesn't have the support it could.
Which proposal specifically, won?
same, the problem I have with most of the proposals is that they approach urban design as if there were an ideological solution to be unlocked. For SHoP, it is about density, but what does density really have to do with Downtown Dallas? Similarly, Stoss has developed an ideology around landscape urbanism. The Kohki Hiranuma is a one-liner. The U-T Arlington proposal is straight-up new urbanism that presupposes $10B+ investment to function. The UM proposal is sort of OMA lite that starts with a formal conceit and doesn't get much further.
Of all of them, the Stoss proposal is probably the most interesting in that it does begin to propose a solution to a larger ecological problem (but ignores most everything else). None of the proposals seems to have anything to do with the existing Downtown; the actual highway infrastructure in most is treated as a "necessary evil" that you wedge program into and around. In all there is an almost palpable tension between the real (the city, the highways, the river) and the idealized (everything else).
I should probably just stop because I'm being a negative Nancy, but I think as these things go, creative solutions to real problems would have produced more exciting results.
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