Harvard University Graduate School of Design’s Ninth Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design goes to Weiss/Manfredi for Seattle Waterfront Project
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Image credits: (left) Bruce Moore; (right) Benjamin Benschneider |
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CAMBRIDGE, MA (March 15, 2007)—Harvard University Graduate School of Design, today announced that the firm of Weiss/Manfredi will receive the ninth Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design in recognition of the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park. Transforming a dilapidated brownfield site, the park creates a new landscape for art within the urban infrastructure, reconnecting the city to the Puget Sound waterfront. This is the first time the winning project has been located in the U.S.
Sponsored by the School’s Department of Urban Planning and Design, the $50,000 prize will be presented on December 5 at the GSD. An accompanying exhibition and publication of a book about the winning project are also scheduled for the award ceremony.
The strategy of Weiss/Manfredi to design a park that crosses and connects Seattle’s urban fabric without denying the energy of the heavily trafficked area running along the waterfront deserves special credit. The park not only brings sculpture outside of the museum walls, but brings the park itself into the landscape of the city. The park becomes a piece of sculpture itself, reframing its urban condition. The Olympic Sculpture Park represents a breed of institutional urban design which succeeds in expanding a specific, non-commercial project to create a robust community on a greater urban level and take advantage of the views of the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound.
The Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design is awarded every two years by the GSD to recognize excellence in urban design around the world with an emphasis on projects that contribute to the public realm of a city and improve the quality of urban life. The Green Prize is the foremost award recognizing achievement in this field. The prize has previously honored major projects in Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona, Aleppo, Mexico City and Tokyo by such leading designers as Sir Norman Foster, Fumihiko Maki, West 8 and Alvaro Siza.
Weiss/Manfredi is an exciting, young, multidisciplinary architectural practice based in New York City. The firm has won national and international competitions and been featured in publications and exhibitions at venues world wide, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Architectural Biennale.
Marion Weiss is the Graham Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn School of Design. She received her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Virginia and her Master of Architecture from Yale University. Michael Manfredi received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Notre Dame and his Master of Architecture from Cornell University, where he is the Gensler Visiting Professor at the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.