UO student team honored in Urban Land Institute competition

March 12, 2015

Architecture students Roxanne Robles, Gilberto Villalobos, and Omar Hason, landscape architecture student Andrew Jepson-Sullivan, and PPPM students Nestor Guevara and Evelyn Perdomo received an honorable mention in the 2015 Hines/Urban Land Institute design competition for their project titled "Urban Groves."

The jury recognized the UO submission for “the diagrammatic visualization, a good optimization of real estate in plan, as well as the outlined cross section, and general presentation board design.”

Their project was one of only twelve that received awards out of 120 submissions from sixty universities in the United States and Canada.

"Each student invested more than 100 hours in the submittal over an intense two-week period,” said Associate Professor Mark Gillem, the student team’s faculty adviser. “Their effort resulted in an innovative plan that highlighted issues of social, environmental, and fiscal sustainability."

The annual Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Competition challenges graduate students to create proposals for the development or redevelopment of a designated site in a U.S. metropolitan area. The competition is open to graduate students pursuing real estate-related studies at universities in North America.

The 2015 competition challenged multidisciplinary student teams with the task of devising a comprehensive design and development program for parts of the Tulane/Gravier and Iberville neighborhoods in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana.

The competition scenario is based on a hypothetical situation in which community stakeholders come together to create a fictional entity seeking a master plan proposal that not only transforms the area into a thriving urban neighborhood, but also highlights its locational advantages.

“This year’s submissions provide new approaches for how a combination of uses all work together to create an attractive destination that is financially realistic,” said Jury Chairman J. Michael Pitchford, president and chief executive officer at CPDC in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Hines competition is part of an ongoing ULI effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for interdisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges.

Urban Groves
This image above and the images below are from the "Urban Groves" entry that won honorable mention for a UO student team in the 2015 Hines/Urban Land Institute design competition.

canopy

drawing

skateboarders