$10,000 to the most innovative Urban Agriculture concept

Urban Agriculture Ideas Competition – Mowing to Growing

Non-Profit Design Group Terreform ONE Announces First Annual “One Prize” Award to Promote Green Design in Cities

Seeking architects, urban designers, planners, engineers, scientists, artists, students and individuals of all backgrounds:

How can we break the American love affair with the suburban lawn?

Can green houses be incorporated in skyscrapers?

What are the urban design strategies for food production in cities?

Can food grow on rooftops, parking lots, building facades?

What is required to remove foreclosure signs on lawns and convert them to gardens?

December 7, 2009, New York: Brooklyn-based architecture collective Terreform ONE announces the first annual One Prize Award, an open call for innovative new schemes in urban agriculture, with $10,000 to go to the winning contestant.

Since 2006, Terreform ONE has been a pioneer in green design and sustainable construction technology. With visionary proposals in the fields of public transit, waste reuse and community development, as well as lectures, workshops and exhibitions, the Terreform ONE team has pushed the conceptual envelope for ecologically sensitive architecture; One Prize is the group’s latest initiative to advance the burgeoning environmental movement by encouraging designers to imagine new solutions for conservation and renewability, and then giving those designers a platform for their ideas.

For its inaugural year, One Prize takes as its theme Mowing to Growing: A Design Competition for Creating Productive Green Space in Cities. In a country that today squanders some seven billion gallons of water every day watering its 40,000 acres of suburban lawns—and in which only two percent of food is grown locally—Mowing to Growing challenges architects to devise workable means for growing more of America’s food closer to more of America’s communities, and to do so at less expense to our economy and our environment. As Terreform ONE cofounder Mitchell Joachim puts it, “We want to break the American love affair with the suburban lawn.”

Submissions for vertical farming, land reclamation, hydroponic facilities—anything received by the April 30th deadline that meets the competition brief—will be reviewed by a distinguished panel of thinkers and designers, including:

• Cameron Sinclair, Founder, Architecture for Humanity
• Ben Schwegler, Jr., Ph.D., Chief Scientist of Walt Disney Imagineering
• DJ Spooky, AKA Paul D. Miller, electronic and experimental musician, producer and author
• Dickson Despommier, Ph.D., Professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia University and Director of the Vertical Farm Project
• Carol Coletta, president and CEO of CEOs for Cities, Host and Producer of the nationally syndicated public radio show Smart City
• William J. Mitchell, Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, Director, Media Lab’s Smart Cities research group at MIT

The best proposal will come away with the $10,000 cash award, while five finalists will receive prominent year-long exposure on the competition website. After the jury announces its decision on May 31st of 2010, winner and finalists both will present their designs at a ceremony to be promoted by the competition’s media sponsors. The winning schemes will also be featured in a web symposium that will match designers with leading experts in the relevant fields of farming, urban agriculture, planning, and market analysis, with an eye towards taking the proposals to the next level.

The proposals can be for a real or speculative project, for one or more real sites, and located either in the U.S. or applicable to U.S. sites. Further, the proposals need not be generated exclusively for this competition, provided that they address the intent of the competition.

See the competition web site here.