Competition Program

Boundaries

The competition site focuses on the area bounded by 34th Street, Grays Ferry Avenue, and the Schuylkill River. Entrants are encouraged to also examine surrounding areas to highlight connectivity with nearby communities, institutions, and uses. It is strongly suggested that entrants assume construction of the new riverfront trail, as designed in the SRDC ERSA Site Plan, but its inclusion is not mandatory.

Objective

The 4th Annual Ed Bacon Student Design Competition asks entrants to develop innovative design concepts for the future of the Grays Ferry Crescent, a complex site that is representative of other brownfields in Philadelphia and across North America. Entrants are asked to address a range of challenges that stem from the realities of this site’s industrial history, its adjacent neighborhoods, and the anticipated arrival of the coming riverfront trail. Entrants are encouraged to focus on issues of sustainability and physical connectivity, while being responsive to surrounding communities and the site’s historical memory. Finally, entrants should consider the site’s importance to the entire city, and region as a whole.

Design Challenges

Entrants may choose one or many design challenges. Questions below are suggestions, not requirements. The design challenges are intended to guide thought and investigation. Students are encouraged to think innovatively and creatively about the potential of these challenges, rather than sticking solely to the points listed below.

Abandoned Site: The future of the recently vacated DuPont Marshall laboratory complex is one of this competition’s central challenges. Environmental issues may in reality severely limit this site’s redevelopment options. However, entrants are encouraged to be creative in their approach. This land presents a prime opportunity for rethinking and re-imagining a large brownfield at a key urban location.
The Future of Industrial Land: Entrants are encouraged to focus more broadly on the role of industrial sites in a modern city such as Philadelphia. What is the future of industry and industrial sites in America’s contemporary urban landscape? The uses and forms proposed here will have massive impacts on the future shape of the surrounding parcels and neighborhoods. How can we adapt such challenging industrial sites for sustainable, modern uses? What uses and forms are appropriate for an industrial brownfield of this magnitude in a modern, 21st century city?
Contamination: Entrants should take into account the harsh environmental realities of the site, due to its industrial heritage. Different levels of environmental remediation are required depending on the type and intensity of the proposed use. Some uses, such as ground farming may be near impossible, given the high-levels of pollutants introduced into the soil for over a century. How can the redevelopment of this site mitigate the negative environmental impacts on the surrounding neighborhoods and water supply? What type of development is best suited, given the forces at hand?
Sustainability: How can this site become a long-term sustainable asset for its surrounding communities and for Philadelphia? Can industrial lands become re-imagined in this way? Entrants are encouraged to focus on a full range of systems and design issues related to urban sustainability, and determine how they can be applied to this site, given its specific challenges and context.
Neighborhood Connectivity: Although sited along the river, for years the Gray’s Ferry and Forgotten Bottom communities have been suffocated and cut off from the river and from other parts of the city by industrial sites and rail beds. There is little interface with communities across the river. How can these communities become reconnected? How can this site act as a unifying force for disparate communities and uses? What forms and design concepts can help bridge these connectivity issues? Is there a way to utilize old industrial infrastructure to enhance modern connectivity?
Connectivity with Assets: The competition site is located along the river, across from the University of Pennsylvania Health Systems campus, not far from Center City, near significant transportation infrastructure. How can this site tap into these and other assets? What can the advantages of the site’s location contribute to the long-term potential of this section of Philadelphia?
Maximizing the Trail: The efforts of SRDC go a long way in providing a new riverfront asset. It is up to entrants to develop solutions for ensuring that the new trail maximizes its chances to connect people to the waterfront. The challenge is to incorporate the trail, while understanding that its form is malleable, itself removable, and its opportunities for expansion innumerable.
Community Design: How can modern development respond to the site’s context and the architectural typology of surrounding areas? Is there a way to respond to both the context of the Gray’s Ferry and Forgotten Bottom neighborhoods, as well as to the mid-rise, modernist buildings on Penn’s health campus across the river? For a site that has been a self-contained, fenced in complex for decades, how can its redesign create a more connected urban environment?
Questions of Equity: Redevelopment of this site, coupled with the success of the trail extension could cause a spike in property values in nearby Forgotten Bottom. In other Philadelphia neighborhoods, rapid gentrification has squeezed out long-term residents and culturally altered communities. How do we plan and design to address these inevitable problems of transition, equitable growth, and gentrification in an area that is still marginal?
Historical Memory: The site has a compelling place in Philadelphia’s industrial, and earlier post-Colonial history. Its role as a historic river crossing for over 400 years is significant. The site’s history provides entrants with the chance to harness historical memory and respond to this robust past through current development and design innovations.

Program Elements

Successful entries will achieve the following objectives:

Create modern, sustainable, urban design solutions for this complex brownfield site.
Create solutions that are innovative and visionary, while also grounded in the physical and market realities of the site and its surrounding context.
Demonstrate an understanding of the history of this site, and the meaning and repercussions of that history for modern redevelopment.
Harness the opportunities and comparative advantages of the site’s location on the Schuylkill River, and its position in relation to rail and highway routes.
Focus on issues of connectivity between this site, the surrounding old industrial parcels, the immediate neighborhoods, and the city as a whole.
Develop solutions that represent thinking applicable for macro issues of reusing industrial urban land in North America.

Entrants are additionally encouraged to:

Create design solutions that freely combine architecture, planning, urban design, development, and theory in a way that is not constrained by the artificial limits of these various disciplines.
Develop ideas that are visionary yet feasible, that can offer innovative ideas while actually informing the real-world discussion on inner-city reinvestment.
Create highly visual submissions, giving viewers a true sense and experience of the entrant’s imagined future space. Entrants may utilize text as needed to enhance the design, while ensuring that the primary means of communicating ideas is through visual means.