Eager to help cities adapt to climate change, more than 130 design groups from 18 countries entered the Rising Tides competition to come up with a plan to protect the inhabitants of the San Francisco Bay Area from predicted sea level rise.
In December, the Bay Conservation and Development Commission announced the competition to help spur creative answers to climate change. Today, BCDC announced the winners.
According to the Rising Tides site, "the selection of six winners was an unexpected twist in announcing the competition results and illustrated just how many different promising solutions were offered. Juror Walter Hood said it best when he stated, 'San Francisco Bay is not the place for a single idea. Taken as a whole, the six winning entries begin to tell a story about adaptation to sea level rise.'"
The judges picked the winners based on their design's ability to protect new and existing communities, to protect wetlands, retrofit valuable public shoreline infrastructure and anticipate changing shoreline configurations.
Winning designs:Wright Huaiche Yang and J. Lee Stickles, "Topographical Shifts at the Urban Waterfront."
Derek Hoeferlin and Ian Caine, "The 100 Year Plan."
Faulders Studio, "RAYdike"
SOM and Moffatt + Nichol, "BayARC: A Tidal Responsive Barrier."
Kuth/Ranieri Architects, "Folding Water."
Yumi Lee and Yeon Tae Kim, "Evolutionary Recovery."
(The six winners of "Rising Tides: An International Ideas Competition" each received prizes of $4,166)
If you are in San Francisco, you can see the 130 competition entries on display at the Ferry Building until July 19th. Otherwise, you can view all the winners by clicking here.
$75,000 of your tax dollars at work for empty ideas:
1/5/09 BCDC: "The Commission voted to authorize the executive director to enter into a $25,000 (contract) with Meckel Design Consulting to manage an international design competition..." An additional $50,000 from the feds would go to awards. Meckel, CCA Director of Planning and competition organizer, worked the jury, and miraculously half of the "winners," were 3 backwater CCA instructors, while the competition boasted 18 nations.
The usual charlatans are present, like socialite CCA Trustee Byron Kuth and instructor T. Faulders, both self-promoting architects who "hire" students to do the work they can't. K/R suggests an inane levee for the dynamic, deep waters of the bay which would destroy the existing coastline. Faulders' lasers draw an ugly path around the bay to show the path of future neanderthal earthen dikes.
At least do some homework pseudo-professors, there already exist sophisticated dike systems in other countries that aren't like the superficial walls you imagine.
Posted by: alexander revischild on 15 Jul 09
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