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HUD Announces Winners of Rebuild by Design Competition 06-04-14 | News

HUD Announces Winners of Rebuild
by Design Competition

On June 2, 2014, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan announced the six projects that will receive $920 million through its Rebuild by Design competition. The funds will go to New York, New Jersey and New York City to implement the project proposals,
which are designed to make the Hurricane Sandy-affected region more "resilient" to future storms.

The Big U, one of the six designs selected by HUD, proposes a protective system for 10 miles of low-lying geography from West 57th street south to The Battery and up to East 42th street. This winning proposal is from BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), with One Architecture, Starr Whitehouse, James Lima Planning + Development, Project Projects, Green Shield Ecology, AEA Consulting,
Level Agency for Infrastructure, Arcadis, and the Parsons School of
Constructed Environments.

The 6 winning design proposals in HUD's Rebuild by Design competition are:

The BIG U (East River Park), Manhattan "?u The BIG Team ($335 million)

Living with the Bay (Slow Streams), Nassau County, Long Island "?u The Interboro Team ($125 million)

New Meadowlands, Little Ferry, Moonachie, Carlstadt, Teterboro "?u MIT CAU+ZUS+URBANISTEN ($150 million)

Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge, Hoboken, Weehawken, Jersey City "?u OMA ($230 million)

Lifelines, Hunts Point, South Bronx "?u PennDesign/OLIN ($20 million)

Living Breakwaters, Tottenville, Staten Island "?u SCAPE/Landscape Architecture ($60 million)

The genesis of the HUD program was President Obama's Hurricane Sandy rebuilding taskforce efforts to "dramatically improve the physical, ecological, and economic resilience of coastal areas."

The $920 million in HUD funds will finance additional planning, the design of flood protection via berms and wetlands. HUD is spending $60 million alone for the first large-scale experiments with creating reefs that can act as tide-surge mitigation.

The winning project proposals come from teams representing some of the best planning, design and engineering talent in the world, including landscape architects, architects, engineers, ecologists and artists. The projects are spread throughout the region, with funding evenly split between New York and New Jersey.

"These inventive proposals are a blueprint for how communities can maximize resilience as they rebuild and recover from major disasters," writes HUD. "These ideas will serve as a model for how we can mitigate the effects of climate change and natural disasters in communities throughout the Sandy region, the U.S.,
and the world."

"It's my hope that Rebuild by Design will inspire other public-private partnerships to spur innovation and resilience in other parts of the country and around the world," said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.

The Rockefeller Foundation has helped finance the design competition, and been a major player in this
push for "resilience."