Cornell Competes in ULI Gerald D. Hines Competition for 7th Year
The seventh annual Urban Land Institute / Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition began on January 19th and concluded on February 2nd. The competition is a graduate-level student competition focused on interdisciplinary learning for real estate and design students in the United States and Canada. Each team is composed of five members and must have representatives from three disciplines. Typically teams are formed from associated professions such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, engineering, real estate, and business.
This year’s competition site was a 35-acre site located south of downtown Denver. The site included an existing light rail station, big-box retailers and a regional design center. The competition required students to develop a phased master plan for the entire site around existing tenants and the transit station. The ULI Competition also requires a detailed financial analysis for the phased development of the plan. Students were also expected to focus designs toward sustainable growth and green building practices. This year students were asked to present an additional plan for the development in the year 2050 which responded to projected demographic trends. In order to derive their development schemes, the institute distributed briefing materials to the teams describing the problem, the neighborhood background, market information and a required list of submission products.
This year close to 100 applications were submitted from universities across the United States and Canada. Cornell registered five teams. Cornell has not yet placed in the past six years of competition, but increased interest in the competition has led to the creation of a short preparatory course designed to replicate the pace and tenor of the actual competition. During the course, spearheaded by faculty from the department of landscape architecture, the teams were able to develop working relationships and gauge teammates strengths. At the end of February, four finalist teams will be named who will be given an extra month to revise and enhance their initial schemes, present in person their reworked projects, and compete for the grand prize of $50,000. Each of the three remaining finalist teams will receive $10,000.
The competition is named in honor of Gerald D. Hines, the renowned founder of the Hines development company. In its materials for the competition, he is described as “a legend in the land use industry…widely known as a leader who pioneered the use of high-quality planning and architecture as a marketable feature of development in office, residential and mixed-use projects. ‘Real estate development is a very exciting, imaginative field. It involves many disciplines and interaction with so many parts of our world—finance, politics, science, psychology—it affects the lives of so many people,’ Hines said. ‘Through this competition, we are raising awareness among the students of the key role high-quality urban design plays in creating sustainable living environments.’ “