Curry Stone Design Prize

News

  • Archinect: Curry Stone Design Prize Finalists Announced

    Bold and transformative public works in Medellin, Colombia that revitalized the poorest areas of the city in just four years; the reclamation of traditional craftsmanship with a modern twist in rural Bangladesh; and a vibrant global grassroots movement committed to carbon-neutral living, are this year’s finalists for the Curry Stone Design Prize.

    October 22, 2009

  • Design Observer: Design Makes the Difference

    When two city officials in Medellín, Colombia – now former mayor Sergio Fajardo and former director of urban projects Alejandro Echeverri – launched a plan to rejuvenate the entire city, once one of the world’s most notorious drug and murder capitals, the bar seemed almost insurmountable.

    October 22, 2009

  • boingboing: Handmade Mud School

    "This school in Bangladesh has tunnels for reading and playing and sunny, colorful porches." ...

    September 21, 2009

  • treehugger: Prize Finalists Announced

    Designers can be an instrumental force in improving people's lives ...

    September 21, 2009

  • Huffington Post: Resilience Takes Form

    Cameron Sinclair on the topic of the Transition Network ...

    September 17, 2009
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    Recipients

    Transformative Public Works

    2009 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

    A bold and ambitious public works plan for the Colombian city of Medellín that helped revitalize its poorest neighborhoods and transform what was considered the deadliest city in the world into a vibrant, urban hub is the winner of the 2009 Curry Stone Design Prize. Alejandro Echeverri, Medellín’s former director of urban projects, and Sergio Fajardo, the city’s former mayor, will share the $100,000 award, announced today at the IdeaFestival in Louisville, Kentucky. “Our most beautiful buildings,” Fajardo has said, “must be in our poorest areas.”
    Extended Profile

    Handmade Building

    2009 Curry Stone Design Prize Finalist

    The “handmade” village schools and single-family homes designed by
    Anna Heringer in rural Bangladesh are an elegant blend of old and new, bucking the growing trend toward cement and steel buildings in the region by offering a sustainable alternative. These buildings combine local materials such as bamboo and straw with modern building components, and are constructed entirely by hand by local people, without the need for machinery or dependence on outside markets. These beautiful, small-scale community-built structures reaffirm that “progress” can be both ecologically sensitive and support local craftsmanship. Extended Profile

    Transition Network

    2009 Curry Stone Design Prize Finalist

    The Transition Network is an international, community-led response to global warming and declining oil reserves. The “open source” movement, inspired by Rob Hopkins, a founding member of the Network who founded the Transition Town Totnes, connects more than 200 cities and towns worldwide that have adopted creative and collective approaches to reducing their carbon footprint, from large-scale community gardens to introducing a local currency to encourage local consumption. Hopkins literally wrote the book for the movement, The Transition Handbook. “In Transition,” a new wiki documentary made from video footage submitted by Transition Initiative leaders worldwide, is available for group screenings this month, followed by a DVD release in December. Extended Profile

    Urban Indigenous Architecture

    2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

    Luyanda Mphahlwa and Mphethi Morojele are the creative forces behind MMA Architects, a firm on the vanguard of a new wave of designers that is reshaping and reenvisioning South Africa’s post-apartheid architectural landscape. As one of the few black-owned architecture firms in the country, MMA is pioneering is a new style of architecture that integrates and elevates African-inspired design in both rural and urban settings. Extended Profile

    Windbelt Generator

    2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Finalist

    Shawn Frayne is an entrepreneur and the inventor of the world’s first non-turbine wind-powered generator, a new technology that has enormous potential to help people in poor communities power lamps, keep small vaccine refrigerators cool, and charge cell phones for relatively little cost. Extended Profile

    Leftover Spaces

    2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Finalist

    Wes Janz is an architect and associate professor of architecture at Ball State University whose practice and teachings focus on the transformative potential of “leftover spaces,” the slum dwellings, squatter towns and refugee settlements that house 1 billion of the world’s poor. For Janz, these impoverished sites are also living testaments to human resourcefulness and ingenuity: the shelters built from detritus and recycled materials possess a utilitarian beauty wrought of necessity. According to Janz, these “informal pioneers of global urbanism” have much to teach contemporary professional architects who have heeded “the same voices, the same pieces of architecture, and the same logic systems for too long.” As the demand for safe, low-cost shelter grows around the world, Janz argues, global citizen-architects have an important role to play. Extended Profile

    Participatory Design and Storytelling

    2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Finalist

    Marjetica Potrc is an artist and architect known for working closely with local communities to devise homegrown, sustainable solutions to the daily quality-of-life dilemmas that affect people who live in the world’s city slums. As part of a process she calls “participatory design,” Potrc has spent months immersed in places such as settlements in the Western Balkans to the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, engaging the knowledge of local people and drawing from existing materials to create designs to improve the living conditions of an individual family or an entire community. Her work is driven by her belief that, “Citizens are the ones who make the city.” Extended Profile

    Subversive Design

    2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Finalist

    Antonio Scarponi is an architect whose interdisciplinary projects use elements from architecture, multimedia arts and design to “jam” the conventional social order of contemporary society. His work, which transforms public space and everyday objects into catalysts for public dialogue, both reflects and interrogates today’s global community by illuminating our shared humanity as well as the socio-political lines that divide us. Extended Profile