Architecture News

Winners of LA Transit Competition Announced

By Aleksandr Bierig

**LA Transit Competition Winners**

*Team’s explanation:* Más is regional high-speed rail for Los Angeles with a landscape to match. It diversifies the communities in the built environment, making travel less necessary, easier and more predictable, bypassing roadway congestion through a new raised infrastructure. Travel times improve will over time with the addition of new trains. Más also links local and inter-regional commuting, providing frequent service that will sync up with the California High Speed Rail network. San Diego via Más is less than an hour away, including transfer times, and San Francisco is less than three hours away.

*Image courtesy Sci-Arc/The Architect’s Newspaper*

SCI-Arc and The Architect’s Newspaper recently announced the winners of A New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for Los Angeles.

Professional 1st Prize: Más Transit

The ideas competition, featured in a January 21 story in RECORD, drew 75 entries from around the world. The brief, which asked entrants to “rethink the relationship between transit systems, public space, and urban redevelopment,” was inspired by both the federal stimulus program and Measure R—a half-cent sales tax increase in Los Angeles County that promises to provide $40 billion for transit-related projects in the next 30 years. The jury gave first-, second-, and third-place awards, and three honorable mentions, in both professional and student categories. The list of winners is below.

Eric Owen Moss, director of SCI-Arc and jury member, hopes the competition will spur discussion about large-scale planning efforts in the Los Angeles, noting that “it’s a very retrogressive city in respect to any ideas about urbanism or the future of the city.”

Sam Lubell, editor of the California edition of The Architect’s Newspaper, and one of the competition organizers, stressed that the winning entries were only a sampling of many strong proposals, any number of which could contribute to an ongoing discussion of transit planning in the region. There were several themes that ran through the entries, he adds, such as investigating different scales of transit and reclaiming unused land, like highway medians, for mass-transit additions.

Lubell and his co-organizer, Peter Zellner of SCI-Arc’s SCI-FI urban studies program, have scheduled a number of functions following the competition to try to keep the discussion going. An event list is on SCI-Arc’s Web site.

.Professional

1st Prize
Más Transit
Radical Craft: Joshua G. Stein, Jacob M. Brostoff, Jaclyn Thomforde, Aaron Whelton
www.radical-craft.com, Los Angeles, CA

2nd Prize
Infrastructural Armature
Fletcher Studio: Dylan Barlow, Ryan Chandler, Daniel Phillips, Tobi Adamolekun
www.fletcherstudio.com, San Francisco, CA

3rd Prize
Mag Luv
Osborn: Holly Chisholm, Kate Harvey, Armen Isagholi, Takeshi Kobayashi, Michael Pinto, Jared Sopko, Esmeralda Ward, Yuju Yeo
www.osborn320.com, Glendale, CA

Honorable Mentions
Green Tech City
NBBJ: Harry Bairamian, Hrant Bairamian, So Eun Cho, Tony Choi, Scott Hunter, Byoung Kweon, Anthony Manzo, Nnamdi Ugenyi, Jonathan Ward, Tim Zamora

Mobility on Demand
RSA: Dwight Bond, Diane Tadena, James Wong

Go Mixed-Modal
Tom Beresford

Student

1st Prize
Glocalizing Los Angeles
Ryan Lovett
University of California, Berkeley

2nd Prize
Modular Diffusion
Alan Lu, Yan-ping Wang
University of California, Berkeley

3rd Prize
Freeways Are For Trains
Ben Abelman, Vivian Ngo, Julia Siedle
Columbia University

Honorable Mentions
Feeding Community and the Gold Line
Roe Goodman
University of British Columbia

Interstate 10
Tim Do, George LaBeth, Randy Stogsdill
SCI-Arc

Cross-Link/ Cross-Program
Minjeong Gweon
Cal Poly Pomona

Organizer’s Selections

Fast, Fluid & Free
ODBC: Odile Decq

The Answer Is Not Mass(ive) Transit
Wes Jones