ASU Research E-Magazine: Winning the Final Four of Design

Every big city seems to have at least one of these places—an industrial no-man’s land on the edge of downtown. Once booming, these landscapes have fallen on hard times. The scene is eerily familiar: lonely streets of abandoned warehouses and torn-up railroad tracks; empty lots strewn with buckled asphalt and broken glass. Nearby, a river slides past banks choked with weeds. It’s the kind of place where dead bodies turn up on TV crime dramas.

Imagine that it’s your job to come up with a plan that would make this place a hot spot for night clubbers and office workers, park lovers and conventioneers, theater goers and apartment dwellers, store owners and shoppers.

Imagine giving yourself one month to draft the plan before presenting your ideas to national experts in the fields of architecture, urban planning and real estate development.

Imagine competing for top honors against talented students from some of the nation’s most prestigious schools.

That’s exactly what five Arizona State University graduate students did with their free time during the spring 2004 semester. It all began in February when their proposal to the prestigious Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition was selected as one of four semifinalist projects out of 56 entries from around the country. The competition is sponsored by the Urban Land Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank devoted to the study of land-use issues.

The semifinalist teams were given one month to refine their vision for a derelict, 57-acre parcel on the banks of the Allegheny River in downtown Pittsburgh. In April, the ASU team traveled to Pittsburgh to present its ideas to a panel of judges.

Weeks of grueling work paid off. The ASU students beat out competing teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and a combined team from the University of California-Berkeley and Stanford University. As added reward for their hard work and innovative ideas, the ASU students walked away with $50,000 in prize money.

The project owes much of its success to team leader Prasoon Kumar. An architect by training, he had enrolled in ASU’s environmental planning program to gain additional skills for tackling large-scale urban-development projects in his native India. Little did he know that the competition would turn out to be a crash course in this kind of real-world development.

Kumar’s first task was building a team. But it was no easy matter. Competition guidelines called for student representation from several different real estate-related disciplines. Areas of concentration could range from real-estate development, city planning, urban design, architecture and landscape architecture to fields such as finance and law.

Kumar consulted with faculty in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED) and the W.P. Carey School of Business. He assembled a group of five students that included Parul Mittal and Timothy Parke, also enrolled in environmental planning; Mathew Muller in architecture; and Mohan Sankrit in business.

The students developed a revitalization scheme, entitled “Destination Allegheny.” Their plan called for a riverfront plaza, a marina and hotel, as well as premium housing, office and retail developments. To contain and treat storm water runoff on site, they added a series of constructed wetlands that doubled as public open space.

“The goal of the competition was not just to come up with a pretty design scheme,” explains Catherine Spellman, an ASU associate professor of architecture who served as the team’s official faculty advisor. “The whole point was to encourage universities to start looking at urban design problems in all their complexity. You need the expertise from the architecture side, the business side, the real estate side, the development side, the ecological side. All these people have to work together to solve problems on this scale.”

For example, the students were given a hypothetical budget—$50 million in seed money from the City of Pittsburgh. After juggling a mind-boggling array of variables, they drafted a financial plan that would phase in development in four stages over a 20-year period.

The students estimated how much new infrastructure—such as roads, sewers, and utilities—would be needed to support the new development. They developed working ratios of public open space to private development. And they addressed ecological concerns such as cleaning up polluted soils and routing storm water flows away from the Allegheny River.

To help them prepare for these complexities, Cheryl McNab, former director of external relations for CAED, set up almost daily tutorials with long-time supporters of the college from around the Phoenix metro area. The mentors included real estate bankers and developers, urban planners from the City of Phoenix and private firms, architects and landscape architects, as well as faculty from ASU’s business and design schools.

By the time the ASU team made their final presentation in Pittsburgh, they had consulted some 70 community professionals and faculty members, rehearsing and refining their presentation dozens of times.

“When they presented their project the final time in Pittsburgh,” Spellman recalls, “I almost started crying, they were so good. There was no question in my mind that they had won by a landslide. These five students now understand the bigger picture.”—Adelheid Fischer