2019 URBAN GUILD AWARD WINNERS

Category: Design Excellence

This award celebrates built design work that masterfully applies timeless design principles in a manner that refines them and best integrates them into their urban context. Submitted projects may be any type, scale, or program so long as they are successful in directly furthering the mission of the Guild. Submitted design work for this category must have been built within the past five years.

Submitted by:
Robert A. M. Stern Architects
New York, New York

Courier Square Phase I, downtown Charleston, South Carolina's newest gateway to the city's center (or 'The Peninsula' as it is colloquially called) is part of a larger multi-phase redevelopment project that extends the city's urban fabric north from its already bustling Broad Street; it is composed of two distinct buildings: an office building along Meeting Street and a residential building at Columbus Street. A greenway bisecting Phases I and III has been proposed to serve as a city park, a passage to downtown for pedestrians and cyclists, and a link connecting neighborhoods divided in the 1960s by I-26.

The office building carries forward Charleston’s tradition of commercial architecture with Greek Revival vocabulary. At the ground level, shopfronts set into rusticated stone facades activate Meeting Street. Above, sixteen Ionic columns are set into the stucco facade to reinforce its presence on King Street.

The Guild, an eight-story loft-style brick apartment building providing 220 apartments, recalls the industrial character of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century warehouses in the area. Ground-floor shopfronts line Columbus Street. These two buildings mask an enclosed parking structure at the center of the site. A roof terrace provides residents with a lounge area and a pool and offers views to the east. A clock tower rises 120 feet above the site of the proposed greenway, visually marking the development from I-26. We partnered with a local firm to ensure accurate historic expressions of use and details.

COTTAGE COURT at the CAVALIER RESIDENCES (Merit Award)
Virgina Beach, Virgina

Nestled among the native live oaks, nine charming cottages surround a green park with a central fire pit that provides opportunities for conversation and relaxation. Preserving the live oaks and placing these quaint homes around and under the limbs was a priority, maintaining the beauty of the 1927 Hotel Cavalier grounds, located a few short steps from the Atlantic Ocean in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

These one-story homes range from 667 to 804 square feet, and feature an inviting front porch that steps down to a winding brick path that meanders to the beach. These porches are all similar in style but each has its own unique character. This is also true of the varied and unique roof lines. Although, these homes are tiny they live big because of the natural lighting from the strategic placement of the windows. Each of the homes boast a large, open great room with a full kitchen overlooking it. The master bedrooms are efficient and include an adequate bathroom. Several of the cottages feature a storage loft, and some have a second bathroom to accommodate the guests staying in the bunk room or up in the loft. Most of the lofts are accessed via a library ladder, but one version has a spiral staircase.

More people are choosing to live in smaller homes, and enjoy the environment surrounding them. These cottages are perfect for a cool drink by the fire pit or a short walk on the beach.

Category: Design Exploration

This award celebrates built or unbuilt design work that demonstrates visionary innovation within an urban context. In the context of this award, ‘exploration’ is understood as a conscious attempt to identify new and innovative design strategies for improving the urban built environment. Submitted projects may be any type, scale, or program so long as they are successful in directly furthering the mission of the Guild. Submitted design work for this category must have been designed within the past five years.

THE BOROUGH (Award)
Carlton Landing, Oklahoma

In 2012, Clay Chapman began a structural masonry revival integrating classical practices with modern technologies to create a faux-free, extreme lifecycle vernacular. The goal is to establish an affordable, multi-century alternative to disposable building, and teach others how to continue building this way. The Initiative has been as much about producing a new kind of builder, as it has been about defining a new manner of building.

During the first five year period of R & D, we built one project per year while determining a base line of best practices. After taking the concept to scale in August of 2017, production was bumped by 300%. Construction begins with the ‘High Agency Massing’ which secures legacy by delivering many useful lives. A house can be reduced to it’s masonry superstructure repeatedly without loss to the building’s identity or cultural significance.

This massing stage is followed by conventional, ‘Low Agency Outfitting’ which secures the economy of standard practice. This aspect of the build survives along the high agency substrate, and encompasses everything attached to, or resting upon, the massing. Low agency elements provide the convenience and comfort of our age, and have one or two useful lives. The bifurcated model takes two very different approaches to building, and rather than asking either to oppose it’s own nature, assigns to each the duty to which it is best suited. Mass wall for long life, Convention for cost effectiveness. Fuse them together and we land on a long-range approach to building that’s competitive and affordable.

THE HORTON-PETTY RESIDENCE (Merit Award)
New Providence, Bahamas

We collaborated with our designer on a single-family residential cottage on a 7,000 square foot lot in the West of New Providence, Bahamas. It was our mission to provide a home for us and our two children using lessons from traditional Bahamian architecture coupled with modern techniques to achieve a home that was at one with its environment. Highlights from our home include: tall double hung sash windows and high ceilings for natural ventilation; insulation in the exterior walls and roof, and screened back porch to help reduce the need for air conditioning except for the hottest days; high pitched 5V crimp metal roof with limited overhang for resisting hurricanes; interior walls designed and built of one layer of v-joint with shelves built in rather than two layers of dry wall to avoid mold in the humid climate and maximize use of space; propane stove, dryer and water heater to reduce reliance on high local electricity costs; the gas stove and water heater, together with the natural light and ventilation from the many tall windows also largely eliminate the need for a generator in a country with regular short and long summertime power outages; many materials were produced locally (including concrete blocks, stone finish tiles and wood flooring) reducing the environmental impact of the construction process.

CHECKERBOARD HOUSING (Merit Award)
Baton Rouge, Louisiana

The Checkerboard Housing is a simple, inexpensive residential building which was conceived during a charrette as a way to revitalize a neglected neighborhood. It is coupled with an innovative way of dealing with parking - laying an elegant gravel entry court fronting the building instead of harsh black pavement. The resulting rhythm of solids and voids makes it resemble a checkerboard, lending its name.

The Checkerboard building has several significant advantages over similar buildings:

• This building type can be efficient to build: when sprinkled, this three-story walk-up is compatible with egress requirements, without additional stairs or elevators.

• The building is less expensive and easier to construct, making it an accessible project for a non-large-scale developer.

• This building type also allows a high proportion of corner units with many windows for access to daylight and cross ventilation that many new buildings lack.

Urban Benefits:

• Retaining the traditional block structure of a 2:1 proportion results in minimal re-routing of existing utility locations.

• Maintaining a consistent frontage allows a controlled and safer environment, but also allows a secured block condition, so that the interior of the block courts may also be locked when necessary, without deteriorating the interactive face of the street.

• The open space fronting the buildings will be used for parking and will be covered with an attractive gravel surface. Additionally, by using gravel, trees can be used to indicate parking spaces and provide shade.

MANUFACTURED HOUSING (Merit Award)
Florida

The manufactured housing industry solved the problem of affordability long ago, yet it faces intense cultural obstacles to permitting. This submission aims to overcome these obstacles (and reform the industry) by providing structures that are not only affordable and efficient, but also elegant and beautiful.

The premise of these designs is that as long as a mobile home looks like a house, it will be seen as inferior to a house, and insofar as it looks like a shipping container, it will be judged as superior to the container. The resultant aesthetic, which is modernist, releases two design constraints. First, the flat roof permits an interior ceiling height of 10 feet. Second, the ganged glazing catalyzes plans that are more responsive to flowing space, which these small units require. Also note that the homes have deployable awnings that are designed to provide shade and double as hurricane shutters when lowered.

The two submitted plans show aesthetics which are part of a comprehensive agenda of new designs that respond to every market program. There is also a radical rethinking of footings and site plans.

Category: Student Awards

This award celebrates built or unbuilt design work which exemplifies criteria in either Design Excellence or Design Exploration, but is performed by a student. Submitted projects must have been completed within the past five years, and will be accepted even if the person submitting the project is no longer a student.

A VISION of a NEW NEIGHBORHOOD
Sevilla, Spain

This proposal came of a team project for a studio in Andalusian architecture and urbanism. Assigned to imagine the next phase of the development of Sevilla, Spain, the team was allowed to select a site for this expansion, and we chose to focus on a currently industrialized area between the city’s fairgrounds and an underused artificial inlet off the Guadalquivir River. We wanted to locate the new development as near to the historic urban center as possible without infringing on the culturally significant fairgrounds. Admiring the rich and complex urban fabric of Old Sevilla, we sought to channel this complexity in both form and morphology in our own design. To that end, we approached the assignment more as if we were documenting the natural growth of a city, rather than imposing our own design from above. We attempted to simulate a process of emergent growth by designing with the fourth dimension, producing an “accretion diagram” to illustrate how we imagine the new neighborhood might come to be over time. Each piece of the city is designed and redesigned chronologically, with careful consideration given to the factors which would shape it in a real city, including codes, topography, commerce, traffic, climate, and culture. The result of this process was a series of varied public spaces with particular characters, functionally diverse blocks, and attractive Sevillian streets. Our vision is not a prescriptive plan asking strict adherence; it instead suggests there are many sustainable, practical, and beautiful possibilities for the future of Sevilla.

GUADALUPE HIRIAN: A NEW TOWN FOR HONDARRIBIA
Hondarribia, Spain

Just across the border from France is the City of Hondarribia and its now defunct Fuerte de Guadalupe de Hondarribia. In this design studio, each student was tasked with developing a new town around the fort to serve as an extension of Hondarribia. The principles of timeless urbanism as described by Camillo Sitte and Leon Krier informed decisions of the plan. The whole of the program fits within a five-minute walking radius, creating an opportunity to place emphasis on small spaces and their arrangement. The study and synthesis of the architecture of historic Hondarribia established the subsequent architectural framework.

The siting, along with the natural and historic context invokes the precedent of traditional medieval settlements in Europe, including:
• a range of destinations oriented to the pedestrian.
• irregularly shaped, interconnected spaces that are organized to draw people from place to place and provide an interesting experience.
• a flexible master plan to accommodate incremental growth.

For the proposal to feel as though it may have been composed in conjunction with Hondarribia, the following were studied:
• historic urban fabric of Hondarribia.
• existing building compositions.
• existing natural conditions, and the Fuerte de Gaudalupe.

The proposed design incorporates an understanding of the urban spaces, establishing the appropriate scales and architecture for a new town - Guadalupe Hirian - that:
• engages in a continuous dialogue though history by conforming to context while allowing for some innovation to contemporary lifestyles
• adds to the collective sense of place and celebrates the history of Hondarribia

A ROMAN VILLA and GARDENS
Rome, Italy

The project is located on an arrow head shaped site adjacent to the Colosseum in Rome, Italy to serve as a park for the nearby residential community and museum dedicated to the works of architect Armando Brasini with associated formal gardens.  The primary entrance to the garden is a cryptoporticus off the Piazza del Arco di Constantino leading to a secondary ellipsoidal piazza that houses the stair bringing pedestrians up to the garden.  At this point, the distinction is made between the more natural, bosco style public park that services the area residents, and the museum’s gardens.  The formal garden is composed of units that unfold into two axes parallel to the Via Celio Vibenna that slide past each other and are anchored by the theater.  The main entrance to the villa consists of a piazza on the level of the Via Celio Vibbenna that is linked with the orchestra of the theater, which also acts as a level transition from the street to the garden.  The villa sits raised above the street level.  It is linked to the surrounding garden elements by two gravel paved piazze.  Its circular courtyard mediates the multiple directions of approach and entries to the building as well as its dual functions of a gallery and archive.  The left lobby serves the gallery above and the right lobby serves the archive on the level below.  The elevation of the villa was inspired the architecture of Jerash, Palmyra, Ephesus and frescos from the Baths of Titus.

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