Manhattan is only a few miles wide and roughly 10 miles in length, and just about every square inch has been developed. So it blows me away that cities like L.A. still have miles of property, in the city proper, that they still have the leeway to remake.
One such area is L.A.'s Cleantech Corridor, a gargantuan chunk of land bordering downtown L.A., that as of yesterday became the subject of its own large-scale design competition:
The Southern California Institute of Architecture and The Architect's Newspaper are launching the Los Angeles Clean Tech Corridor and Green District Competition. The competition asks architects, landscape architects, designers, engineers, urban planners, students and environmental professionals to create an innovative urban vision for Los Angeles' CleanTech Corridor, a several-mile-long development zone on the eastern edge of downtown LA.The competition, which offers more than $11,000 in prize money, is presented with the Office of the Mayor of Los Angeles and the Community Redevelopment Agency of Los Angeles, which established the Clean Tech Corridor. It asks entrants to move beyond industrial uses; creating an integrated economic, residential, clean energy, and cultural engine for the city through architectural and urban strategies. Crucially, this competition will provide an open ideas forum for provocative, even revolutionary, new visions of LA's urban fabric and infrastructure.
The deadline is September 30th, and it's open to professionals and students alike. Learn more here.