Summary: The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards Prize jury on March 12 named the University of Virginia as the $25,000 grand prize winner of the 2007 NCARB Prize. The annual award, as envisioned by 2001 NCARB President Peter Steffian, FAIA, recognizes excellence and innovation when bringing together architecture education and practice. Architecture schools with NAAB-accredited degree programs were invited to submit established projects—completed or in progress by the end of the fall 2005 semester—that demonstrate creative initiatives that integrate the academy and the profession within a studio curriculum.

UVa Creates Housing Prototypes
The University of Virginia entry “ecoMOD,” is a research and design/build/evaluate project to create well-designed, affordable housing prototypes that are modern, modular, environmentally responsible, and energy efficient through a partnership of the architecture and engineering programs. This is a multi-year project of interdisciplinary teams of architecture, engineering, landscape architecture, historic preservation, business, environmental science, and economic students. Students work closely with a variety of design and business professionals throughout all three phases of the project.

The 2007 NCARB Prize jury noted that the UVa project involved “an extraordinary array of collaborators and a real balance among all the participants.” The jury also noted: “The product itself demonstrates that having a great process, responsiveness to environmental concerns, and other good intentions, does not compromise the design or the end result.”

Five more projects honored
The 2007 NCARB Prize jury honored five additional programs, each of which will receive a $7,500 monetary award.

University of Arkansas “Habitat Trails: from infill housing to green neighborhood design”:
Through a collaborative venture among architecture, landscape architecture, and ecological engineering departments, the project’s objective was to provide an affordable housing provider with a low-impact development that offers high-value, affordable residential solutions to underserved populations and their surrounding communities. The studio publication serves as a statewide advocacy platform for advancing low-impact development protocols. “While it was a strong design project addressing sustainability and single-family housing issues, its uniqueness was that it extended into policy, more specifically establishing green development policy,” according to the jury.

University of Southern California “Re-expanding Architectural Practice”:
The school curriculum was redesigned to demonstrate the breadth of the architecture design profession and encourage students to understand that they have the responsibility to maintain a broad understanding of design. To do so, a series of six mini-seminars were combined into a single course taught by faculty-member and practitioner teams. According to the jury: “It gives the students exposure to many subjects in one course [and] brings students into firm offices to work with practitioners in their own environment, including evening and weekend charrettes.”

University of Virginia “Learning Barge”:
The purpose of this multi-semester, interdisciplinary project is to design and build the Learning Barge, a floating, self-sustaining field station located on one of the most polluted tributaries of the Chesapeake Bay. Moving to a different restoration site every few months, the Learning Barge is designed to teach the public about the tidal-estuary-ecosystem, wetland, and oyster-bed restoration and remediation efforts. It also is designed to teach about sustainable power generation, water collection, and water filtration using native plants. The project establishes a proactive model of both service-learning and professional engagement. According to the jury: “The project is a tremendous regional educational tool for the public at large and gives the public the opportunity to experience the waterway.”

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee “Reweaving the Neighborhood Fabric: How Modular Housing Can Build Affordable and Dignified Communities”:
Working through a process involving practitioners, community members, and home manufacturers, student teams each designed an affordable, sustainable, and accessible prototype home for an inner-city neighborhood where affordable housing is scarce. Students presented the designs to local policy makers to work with them on pragmatic issues and produced a set of working drawings for the modular home manufacturers to begin fabrication. According to the jury: “Strong points are the work with modular manufacturers and firms; its willingness to take on a variety of issues including sustainability, integration into the neighborhoods, and material selection; and the emphasis on the process of building, particularly over a critical timeframe.”

Washington University in St. Louis “Research: practice-based study in the academy”:
A program of independent studies for students that provides research opportunities related to contemporary architecture design and technology in offices of practicing architects and engineers across the country. Students work with professional staff in the offices and with others in the building industry to facilitate their research through case-study analysis and theoretical investigations. According to the jury: “While the curriculum generates the research, the individual projects generate new knowledge and/or new applications of prior knowledge, and the students in turn present the information to the entire office.”