“The Big U,” one of the winners of the Rebuild by Design contest. Photo credit: THE BIG TEAM / Rebuild by Design

The New York Metropolitan area will soon see a massive, $335 million berm along Manhattan’s Lower East Side, a $60 million living breakwater along Staten Island’s South Shore, a $20 million study of protecting the food distribution center in the Bronx neighborhood of Hunts Point and a $125 million effort to protect north south waterways and the Mill River in Southern Nassau County.

Selected as winners of the Department of Housing and Urban Development-backed Rebuild by Design contest, the proposals will receive nearly one billion from HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program to move into an implementation phase. The winners from New Jersey, which will receive $380 million, will be announced this afternoon.

Such significant financial support from the federal government not only marks a notable shift in the way HUD distributes disaster relief funds, it also establishes a new and powerful role for design competitions in the United States.

The BIG Team was led by BIG Bjarke Ingels Group and includes One Architecture (water & urban planning), Starr Whitehouse (landscape architecture), Buro Happold (engineering & sustainability), Level Infrastructure, (infrastructure engineering), James Lima Planning & Development (finance & economics), Green Shield Ecology (ecology), AEA Consulting (arts & cultural planning), Arcadis (hydraulic engineering), Project Projects (graphic design), and the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons the New School for Design. It’s winning proposal will bring a massive green berm to the Lower East side of Manhattan

Previously, contests like Green NOLA — which was put on by Global Green USA after Hurricane Katrina and received significant national attention because the actor Brad Pitt was closely involved — took a similar approach to disaster recovery but lacked the backing of the federal government, as well as the funding and implementation support that is a central component of the Rebuild by Design contest. With nearly $1 billion in backing, Rebuild by Design is by far the largest contest of its kind in the nation’s history.

The winning projects based in New Jersey will receive $380 million in implementation funding. Those targeting New York State will receive $185 million, and the projects focused on New York City will receive $355 million. (Staten Island’s project funding will come out of the pot for New York State)...Continue Reading

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