Restart [Tirupur]
YEAR: 2014 - 2016
TYPE: Competition
FIRM: Restart [your city]
LOCATION: Tirupur, Tamil Nadu, India
CLIENT: AECOM
COLLABORATORS: Potters for Peace
TEAM: Emily Rosanna Saunders
AWARDS: Winning Entry
_Description
Restart [Tirupur] was the winning entry in AECOM’s annual global student competition, Urban SOS Open Ideas. Our proposal, Restart [Tirupur], aimed to reactivate abandoned factories located on the periphery of Tirupur as self-sustaining, resilient communities via affordable infrastructure such as clay water filter pots, start-up hubs and bamboo housing. The proposal provides migrant workers in Tirupur with the tools necessary to obtain clean water, self-grown food sources, and native materials for building and designing resilient shelters in the community. Our goal was to activate the greatest untapped resource in Tirupur, the people that call it home, to reclaim the polluted and abandoned buildings from the very industry that brought migrants to the city.
_The Competition Brief
‘The 2014 Urban SOS brief – Towards a New Industry – asked design students to tackle an economic problem. Student teams were asked to propose design projects that re-animate an abandoned or underutilized industrial space or place of production within a city. Responses could range from macro to micro and had to pair a design response with a commercial awareness. As an interdisciplinary practice engaged with shaping cities around the world, this topic at the intersection of design and economics is of particular interest to us.’
_Comments
“All four finalist schemes were incredibly strong and their designers should be proud of their achievement in getting to the top four. They emerged from hundreds of projects that were reviewed by multi-disciplinary juries in 30 AECOM offices/studios around the world, from Abu Dhabi to Pretoria. Over one week in August, the groups met in a unique global ‘super-jury’ consisting of more than 250 AECOM designers, planners and engineers who whittled the entries down to the final four.
Those four teams were then flown to New York to present in an evening charrette before a finalist jury of my colleagues, architects Bill Hanway and Ross Wimer, landscape architects Joe Brown and Jacinta McCann, urban designer Stephen Engblom and civil engineer Jane Chmielinski, AECOM’s chief operating officer. They were joined by Jeffrey Johnson, director of the China Lab at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Nellwyn Thomas of Etsy and Alexis Michael of property developer Hines.” - Daniel Elsea, Creative Director for AECOM’s Buildings + Places group
_Press
2014 Landscape Architecture Graduate Wins AECOM Award, Penn State
Urban SOS One Project At A Time, AECOM