Parallel Projections has announced the winners of the Reanimate the Ruins competition, an international challenge to redesign and memorialize Detroit's historic Packard Motor Plant. The competition called for designers to simultaneously honor Detroit's history, while envisioning a future of technological, social, and aesthetic healing.
This year's jury has selected three winners and six honorable mentions. Read more after the break to explore the award-winning proposals.
First Place: Cross the Plant / Nadau Lavergne Architects
The winning proposal follows a five step process: Open Up, Connect, Reinvest, Attract, Develop. A large scale, cross-shaped urban planning project, the design emphasizes the importance of eliminating poor existing structures, providing public transportation systems and soft mobility facilities to establish connections, and offer environmental healing by restoring surrounding buildings and supporting local farming. The plan also calls for the development of sports facilities, public spaces, cultural and social facilities, safety amenities, schooling, housing, and an international museum to attract visitors and create a dynamic social hub. More about the proposal, here.
Second Place: The Packard Belt / Javier Galindo
The second place project derives inspiration from the Serpentine/Poly-V belt in a car engine. Building on the historic importance of the automobile, the project uses the connective and unifying metaphor of the Poly-V belt to propose a "multifunctional cultural promenade that uses the car as its primary circulation mode." This sinuous promenade simultaneously breaks up a large scale mixed use urban site into more sensitive parcels, and serves to connect each smaller part to unify the entire complex. Terraced landscape surrounds the site and mediates between visitors, residents, and city.
Third Place: Ecological Engineering Center Detroit / Toni Yli-Suvanto
The third place project imagines a way to convert the contributing elements of environmental degradation into a site that promotes healing. The designer creates an integrated system of ecological, economic, and social rejuvenation. The project enables waste purification, food, water, and biological energy production, climate change mitigation, diverse employment opportunities, and healthy community involvement and interaction.
Honorable Mention: Packard City / Bastian Gerner and Pola Rebecca Koch
Honorable Mention: Hollow Grounds: Reconceiving Packard as an Urban Archipelago / Samaa Elimam and James Leng
Honorable Mention: Higher Calling: Establishing a Spiritual Mycoremediation Corriador for Detroit / Tak Stewart, Arnulfo Ramirez, and Giselle Altea
Honorable Mention: Augmented Chassis: Crowd-sourcing the Detroit Streetscape / Jason Butz and Akshita Sivakumar
Honorable Mention: packard[Model D]etroit / Dominic Walbridge, Michael Miller, Yan Ding, and Rossy Iovtcheva
Honorable Mention: Urban Paradox: Architectural Iteration to Paranoiac Tensions / Chun Shing Tsui
