WPA 2.0: an open design competition for working public architecture

Register/Submit first phase digital design sketchbooks: August 7, 2009

Whoever rules the sewers, rules the city.

WPA 2.0 poses this question: What’s in store for the city if design takes back the streets? The limits of pure utility dissolve to reveal infrastructure’s greater powers.  WPA 2.0 is not a sci-fi fantasy, and it’s not the Long Island Expressway.  Show us what it looks like. Tell us how it works.

Jury: Stan Allen, Cecil Balmond, Elizabeth Diller, Walter Hood, Thom Mayne, Marilyn Taylor.

cityLAB, an urban think tank at the UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design, announces a call for entries to WPA 2.0, an open design competition that seeks innovative, implementable proposals that place infrastructure at the heart of rebuilding our cities during this next era of metropolitan recovery. WPA 2.0 recalls the Depression-era Works Projects Administration, which built public buildings, parks, bridges, and roads across the nation as an investment in the future—one that has, in turn, become a lasting legacy. We encourage projects that explore the value of infrastructure not only as an engineering endeavor, but as a robust design opportunity to strengthen communities and revitalize cities. Unlike the previous era, the next generation of such projects will require surgical integration into the existing urban fabric, and will work by intentionally linking systems of points, lines and landscapes; hybridizing economies with ecologies; and overlapping architecture with planning. This notion of infrastructural systems is intentionally broad, including—but not limited to—parks, schools, open space, vehicle storage, sewers, roads, transportation, storm water, waste, food systems, recreation, local economies, ‘green’ infrastructure, fire prevention, markets, landfills, energy-generating facilities, cemeteries, and smart utilities.

About the Competition

Designers of all fields are eligible to submit for this competition, which is staged in two phases. Multi-disciplinary teams are particularly encouraged, in the belief that design invention comes from more integrated approaches to problem-solving—whether by applying new thinking to old problems, or old thinking to new ones—to yield visionary hybrid forms and relationships.

From the first stage submittals, up to six proposals will be selected by a jury of world-renowned design professionals to advance to a second phase. Each finalist team will receive financial support to develop its preliminary design in greater detail. Team representatives will travel to Los Angeles for a workshop in which they will present their proposals to and receive feedback from leading experts in fields relevant to infrastructure and urban redevelopment, such as policy, energy, infrastructure systems, urban agriculture, planning, market analysis and land use development.

The fully-developed, second phase proposals will be presented on Monday, November 16, 2009 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. in a day-long symposium that includes jury members, nationally-recognized experts on infrastructure, and a selection of officials involved with recently-passed stimulus plans and their implementation.  The final projects, along with video from the workshops and symposium, jury commentary, and media coverage, will be featured in a web exhibition launched by cityLAB in February 2010. The proposals will also be featured as part of a larger coverage of the symposium in The Architect’s Newspaper.

Awards: $5,000 to as many as six finalists to continue to develop their proposals. Fully-developed, second phase proposals will be presented on Monday, November 16, 2009 at the National Building Museum to an audience of policymakers, practitioners, critics and scholars.

For more information and registration materials, please visit http://www.wpa2.aud.ucla.edu.

For more information about cityLAB, please visit http://www.citylab.aud.ucla.edu.