A team comprised of four Rutgers University and one City University of New York/Baruch College graduate students received an Honorable Mention for Context Analysis award as part of the 2013 Urban Land Institute/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition.
The five team members included: Chris Kok, Bloustein School (Master of City and Regional Planning 2013); Dori Nguyen, Bloustein School, (Master of City and Regional Planning 2013); Adam Cesanek, Rutgers School of Environmental and Biological Sciences (Master of Landscape Architecture, 2013); Hiromi Ishihara, City University of New York , Baruch College, Zicklin School of Business (MS in Real Estate, 2013); and Matt Aulbach, Rutgers Business School (MBA, 2014).
The competition is an urban design and development challenge for graduate students, challenging multidisciplinary student teams to devise a comprehensive development program for a real, large-scale site. Teams of five students representing at least three disciplines have two weeks to develop solutions that include drawings, site plans, tables, and market-feasible financial data.
For the 2013 ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition, 149 teams from 70 universities in the United States and Canada developed solutions for a site in Minneapolis’s Downtown East neighborhood, near the new Minnesota Vikings stadium.
The Rutgers/CUNY entry, titled Urban Grain, is based on the heritage of Minneapolis, a city vital to the country’s food distribution network and a main hub for grain distribution. As the team members worked through the design concept, they focused on creating a development that embodied the three parts of a grain: bran, germ, and endosperm. These components inspired their redevelopment and helped them to focus on the layers of urban revitalization that are of paramount importance: access network, active street life, and local economy support.
View the presentation board and full narrative summary of Urban Grain.