Announcements

CURRY STONE DESIGN PRIZE AT HARVARD - November 21, 2011

The Curry Stone Design Prize celebrated its three 2011 winners with a two-day festival at...

2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners Announced - October 14, 2011

Bend, OR (October 4, 2011)—The 2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners were announced today with...

2011 Curry Stone Design Grand Prize Winner Announced Sustainable Architecture in Post-Disaster Areas - October 4, 2011

2011 Curry Stone Design Grand Prize Winner Announced
Sustainable Architecture in Post-...

In the News

Winners

Hsieh Ying-Chun, Sun Moon Lake, Taiwan

2011 Curry Stone Design Grand Prize Winner

Hsieh Ying-Chun is a leading Taiwanese architect who for over a decade has deployed his talents in rural areas that have been decimated by natural disaster. Hsieh works throughout Asia, training villagers to build locally appropriate dwellings in response to the devastation of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, the 1999 Nantou earthquake and the 2009 Typhoon Morakot in Taiwan. Through Hsieh's hands-on education process, villagers literally reconstruct their own community foundation, knowing they will live in buildings with greater safety, structural integrity, and sustainability.

Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris

2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

Atelier d'Architecture Autogérée is a collective of architects, designers and social scientists who transform urban spaces through collaborative, localized endeavors. Founded by Franco-Romanian architects Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001, AAA has become an engine for engaging citizens in shaping their own cities through building, farming and artistic intervention. AAA acts as a creative instigator, empowering local communities to carry out and sustain their own ideas for urban regeneration.

FrontlineSMS, London, England

2011 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

FrontlineSMS was founded by Ken Banks in 2005 to enable effective communications channels for communities in the developing world. FrontlineSMS leverages the ubiquity of mobile phones and familiarity of text messaging to turn an offline laptop into a communication hub. The simple innovation empowers villagers, aid agencies, and news services to exchange information among groups easily.

Sustainable Health Enterprises

2010 Curry Stone Design Grand Prize Winner

Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) is addressing girls’ and women’s lack of access to menstrual pads, causing them to miss up to 50 days of work and school annually. Since 2009, the SHE Team, led by founder Elizabeth Scharpf, has built the groundwork to launch a sustainable, locally based micro-capital industry to combat this issue through community based education, business skill training and product design. SHE has designed feminine hygiene products made from locally-sourced banana fiber in Rwanda. Extended Profile

Elemental

2010 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

Elemental, a Chilean design firm and self described “Do Tank” has raised the bar for public housing in the developing world with its transformative design for Iquique’s Quinta Monroy shantytown. Working in close consultation with local residents, Elemental countered the trend of displacing poor people from urban centers by stacking duplex units at diagonals from one other. Founders Pablo Allard, Andres Iacobelli, and Alejandro Arevena’s designs have not only solved the problem of density, but maximized the $7,500-per-unit budget by building “starter” homes that allow people to easily expand and individualize their spaces. As Aravena likes to say, each unit has “the DNA of a middle-class home.”

The firm is now working to build similar dwellings in cities in Brazil, Portugal and other countries.
Extended Profile

Maya Pedal

2010 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

Maya Pedal is a nonprofit organization that invents and builds “Bicimaquinas,” – pedal-powered machines made from used bicycles that make agricultural and household tasks faster and easier for rural residents with limited access to gas and electricity. Founded by Carlos Marroquin, Maya Pedal makes its designs, for everything from grain mills to washing machines and blenders, “open source” so anyone can build them. Their designs, made with bike donations from the U.S. and Canada, have helped spawn small business enterprises in Guatemala and beyond.
Extended Profile

Alejandro Echeverri and Sergio Fajardo

2009 Curry Stone Design Grand 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

Anna Heringer

2009 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

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 Winner

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

Luyanda Mphahlwa

2008 Curry Stone Design Grand Prize Winner

Luyanda Mphahlwa is the creative force 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

Antonio Scarponi

2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

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

Marjetica Potrč

2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

Marjetica Potrč is an artist and architect who works with local communities to devise sustainable solutions for quality-of-life issues affecting people in informal cities. She has spent months in the Western Balkans and the barrios of Caracas, Venezuela, among many other places, working closely with residents and using existing materials to create designs that improve living conditions in
substantial ways. Her work is driven by her belief that, “Citizens are the ones who make the city.”
Extended Profile

Shawn Frayne

2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

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

Wes Janz

2008 Curry Stone Design Prize Winner

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

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