Tina Ward-Pugh Inspects The Winning Entry

The Irish Hill Neighborhood Association announced the winners of a design competition intended to generate ideas for an abandoned brownfield sitein the heart of the neighborhood.  After a close review of twenty submitted entries from around the world and an extended deliberation time, the jury awarded first place honors in the Mediative Urbanisms competition to a proposal by a team from Paris, France entitled A Scenic Walk.

Irish Hill’s competition generated interest from seven countries on four continents and nine U.S. states.  Proposals were varied in scope, theme, and program and each brought a unique set of ideas to the discussion.  Ideas ranged from residential neighborhoods, to mixed-use town centers, to urban farmland, to bike parks, and an urban horse farm.  In the end, the jury appreciated the winning entrant’s balance of natural and built elements on the 30-acre site combined with it’s mixed-use aspects and educational components.

A Scenic Walk creates three distinct landscapes each joined to a particular building type with development pushed to Lexington Road.  The rest of the site is left open as a park with walking paths.  Proposed development include mixed-use buildings and a residential tower set off the road with 60 new residential units.  A large multipurpose space and market place negotiates a new “pond biotope.”  Green strategies were a key element of the proposal both in the landscape and the built structures.

No plans exist to build the winning entry, but the neighborhood hopes the results will help create a vision for moving forward with the property.  Creation of a town center for the neighborhood, conservation of the natural meanders of Beargrass Creek, and multimodal transportation options were major goals of the competition.  All entries will soon be displayed for public viewing, but a site hasn’t yet been found.  We’ll let you know where you can see the proposals when it’s announced.

View of Lexington Road from the Winning Entry

[ Editor's Note: Congratulations to all the entrants and winners for creating such a diverse array of ideas for the future of the Irish Hill neighborhood. I'll post a more comprehensive article shortly with more information about various ideas present in many of the Mediative Urbanisms entries and with better graphics. It was great to see such a large and concerned crowd at the Green Building for the announcement. ]

• Irish Hill Neighborhood Association (Official Site)
• Irish Hill Seeks Your Ideas For Redevelopment (Broken Sidewalk)
• Poe Companies Abandoning Irish Hill Development (Broken Sidewalk)

Click through for a quick look at all the winners.