WASHINGTON (April 2, 2007) - A development proposal drafted by the University of California Berkeley team to redevelop a 16.5-acre block in Los Angeles has been selected as the winning scheme in the fifth annual ULI (Urban Land Institute) Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition. The team's entry was selected over plans submitted by other competition finalist teams from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and two teams from Harvard University.

The graduate student teams, competing in a student ideas competition, were charged with forming a quasi-public agency to redevelop the East First Street corridor from Alameda to Mariachi Plaza, taking into consideration connections to neighborhoods, to a revitalized Los Angeles River proposed in the newly-issued master plan, to the new Gold Line Eastside Extension, and the development of the construction staging sites surrounding Mariachi Plaza after the MTA completes the subway entrance.

The winning team was announced after the final round of the competition, which was held in Los Angeles on March 30, 2007. "Tectonics was a very clear concept about the need to introduce open space into the community and to reconnect the river as a focus and connection, both east and west," said jury chair, William Gilchrist, director of planning for the City of Birmingham, Alabama.

The ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition was created in 2002 to honor the legacy of urban development pioneer Gerald D. Hines, chairman of the Hines real estate organization and the 2002 recipient of the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. The competition is open to graduate students who are pursuing real estate-related studies at a North American university, including programs in real estate development, city planning, urban design, architecture and landscape architecture.

As the winner, the interdisciplinary University of California Berkeley team was awarded a $50,000 prize. Team members were Christopher Lollini, Andrea Gaffney, Robert McCracken, Aditi Rao, and Brooke Ray Smith. The three remaining finalist teams each received $10,000. The competition is designed as an exercise; there is no guarantee or expectation that the students' plans will be implemented as part of any revitalization of the site.

The First Street corridor has attracted major redevelopment in the past decade, including the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Gold Line Eastside Extension, Caltrans' district headquarters building, the Japanese American National Museum, and the Pueblo del Sol, mixed-income housing development. In addition, a new public high school is under construction. In 2006, construction began on an eight-station, six-mile extension of the Gold Line light rail line into East Los Angeles from Union Station.

The competition was held in two stages. In the first stage, 93 teams from 26 universities submitted solutions to an 11-day charette-like planning, designing and development exercise of a master plan for East First Street from Alameda to Mariachi Plaza, an urban design for the portion of the Los Angeles River from the 101 Freeway to the Sixth Street Bridge, and a redevelopment scheme for the MTA construction staging parcels surrounding the new Mariachi Plaza subway entrance. The development challenge for the students was to propose an economically- and environmentally-sustainable mixed-use development that would connect the downtown, Little Tokyo, Arts District and Boyle Heights neighborhoods that are cut off from each other by the north-south, elevated Santa Ana and Golden State freeways.

In the second stage, a team member of each of the four finalist teams was sent to Los Angeles, and the teams were given a new challenge: to propose a mixed-use development for the 16.5-acre city-owned site at First and Alameda.

The winning redevelopment plan, "Tectonics" refers to the metamorphic process of creating new landscapes by forming connections between disparate fragments of Los Angeles' neighborhoods. The urban plan for East First Street encourages a flow of green spaces towards a new park decked over the railyards along the west side of the river, and connecting to the greenway along the east side of the river. This urban-scale swath of green space continues into the residential neighborhoods in Boyle Heights, up to Mariachi Plaza, which is redeveloped with residential rental and ownership units, both market-rate and affordable, above neighborhood-scale retail spaces. "Addressing local needs for open space, recreational, commercial, and entertainment amenities, this tectonic green network connects the core of Los Angeles along critical veins of nature and life," as stated in the plan.

Jury members commended the winning team for its boldness in reconnecting the river to the communities and for designing a scheme that ensured connectivity to the surrounding neighborhoods, both East and West. "The initial proposal was very bold and clear," said Mark Johnson, president, Civitas in Denver. "It addresses what is widely known as a problem with Los Angeles; a very poor distribution of open space available to people of mixed means."

Plans from the other three teams were:

• "Confluencia," from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which used the revitalized river and new transit links to "reconnect the urban islands" that make up Los Angeles. Development along transit, along First Street, reconnects downtown and Boyle Heights with the sprawling Los Angeles archipelago. The riverway, with open spaces extending into surrounding neighborhoods and a greened-in railyards, forms a common spine. At the Mariachi Plaza development zone, commercial space at grade and a high concentration of affordable and workforce housing above are proposed as a model development around transit.
   
• "Spanning the Divide," from Harvard University, which turns the physical and economic divide that is now the river into a shared amenity that brings together downtown and Boyle Heights. Higher-density residential towers on the downtown side of First Street and redevelopment on both sides of the river take advantage of the value created by the river revitalization. The Mariachi Plaza development parcels become an employment generator as a center for the training of hospital workers at the nearby medical complexes at USC and White Memorial.
   
• "East First Street Los Angeles," another entry from Harvard University that introduces urban connections between the neighborhoods north and south of East First Street, reinforces First Street as a corridor and a linear locus of commercial activity. Likewise, the river undergoes revitalization in stages that bring in natural landscape, public art, and new development. The Mariachi Plaza parcels are redeveloped as a mixed-use district of ground-floor retail with commercial offices and 1,124 units of market-rate and affordable housing at build-out.
   

"All the schemes demonstrated impressive levels of creativity and innovation," noted jury chairman Gilchrist. "I am very encouraged to see this kind of collaboration. I have never felt quite this hopeful about the profession," Gilchrist told the students.

In addition to Gilchrist, other members of the jury-all renowned real estate development, urban planning and design experts-were William Chilton, AIA, managing principal, Pickard Chilton, New Haven, Conn.; James J. Curtis III, principal, Bristol Group, San Francisco; Edward A. Feiner, FAIA, director, Washington, D.C. office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP; Mark W. Johnson, FASLA, president, Civitas, Inc., Denver; Evan Rose, AIA, principal, SMWM, New York; Yaromir Steiner, chief executive officer, Steiner + Associates, Columbus, Ohio; and Anne Vernez Moudon, professor of urban design and planning, University of Washington, Seattle.

The four finalists were chosen from 93 teams comprising 465 students representing 26 universities in the U.S. and Canada. Six team entries were previously selected for honorable mentions: "Salsa Verde," the Carnegie-Mellon University; "El Collar Esmeralda," the University of Michigan; "Roots, Branches and Seeds" Texas A&M University; "First Street Focus," University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; "Seeding Communities," University of Pennsylvania; and "Placeholders," University of Texas at Austin. The entries from the four finalists and the six honorable mentions can be found on the competition Web site (www.udcompetition.uli.org).

"We were excited that the site was in California, but we were a little overwhelmed with the scope," said Lollini. "But at the same time, we saw it as an opportunity to do unique and interesting things."

Three of the five students from the UCB team will be graduating this spring and Lollini, who is on active duty in the Navy, will be heading for Pearl Harbor.

The ULI Gerald D. Hines Urban Design Competition has been funded in perpetuity with a $3 million endowment from Gerald Hines. Hines is widely known as an industry leader who pioneered the use of high-quality planning and architecture as a marketable feature of development in office, residential and mixed-use projects across the United States and in 15 foreign countries. "The work by these outstanding students convinces me that the future of our built environment is in good hands," Hines said.

The Urban Land Institute (www.uli.org) is a nonprofit education and research institute supported by its members. Its mission is to provide leadership in the responsible use of land and in creating thriving communities worldwide. Established in 1936, the Institute has more than 35,000 members representing all aspects of land use and development disciplines.