UC students finalists in design, development competition

UC joins two teams from the University of Texas at Austin and a joint team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University as finalists in the Urban Land Institute’s Hines Student Competition, beating out 90 entries from other schools. On April 4, the teams will present their proposals in Cincinnati. The winners will receive $50,000 and their plans just may inform the work of city planners in the future.

This 17th annual “ideas competition” challenges graduate students to devise a comprehensive design and development scheme for an actual site in an urban area. Urban impact is a pillar of UC’s strategic direction, Next Lives Here.

That site just happens to be in UC’s proverbial backyard in Downtown Cincinnati. But that doesn’t necessarily give the local team an advantage.

“I think that can go both ways,” says Danielle Campbell, team leader and community planning master’s degree student in UC’s College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP). “Yes, we can have a market advantage of understanding specific stakeholders. However, other teams can view the site and see all this potential, but we know certain things just can’t work. It almost hindered us.”

Campbell’s team includes Patrick Maney, finance master’s degree student in UC’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business; DAAP architecture master’s degree students Varsha Iyengar, Lorrin Kline and Rachel Kallicharan; faculty advisor Frank Russell, associate professor of multidisciplinary initiatives and director of UC Forward and UC Niehoff Urban Studio; and professional advisor Dave Neyer, president of STNL Development, a Cincinnati firm that specializes in single tenant net lease development.

The students were tasked with integrating the riverfront development, known as The Banks, and the central business district while considering the potential to build “decks” over the highways, something proposed in earlier plans for the city. The teams received the challenge on Jan. 14 and had just two weeks to create a comprehensive design, planning and development scenario that would appeal to residents, workers and visitors.

The UC team developed a concept they call The Anchor that not only bridges the riverfront to downtown, but binds the entire region, further into Cincinnati and across the river to include Northern Kentucky. They took advantage of the decking potential by proposing public space and parks be built above the highways, connecting the city core with the riverfront. The Anchor would serve as a “critical base” for three major regional themes that the team identifies as innovation, creatives and wellness. Each of these industries and audiences would be represented in The Anchor as “The Hive,” “The Reel” and “The Oasis,” respectively.

Cincinnati has become a hotbed of innovation, technology and startups, as evidenced by UC’s 1819 Innovation Hub and forthcoming Uptown Innovation Corridor. In The Anchor this would be  “The Hive,” featuring innovative offices, networking spaces and a public coworking plaza.

Arts also plays a major role in the area, with an array of museums, performance venues and a growing film scene. “The Reel” proposes studio space for films, artists and musicians, an eatery and beer garden within The Anchor.

The Tristate is home to a number of hospitals and healthcare hubs — UC alone contributes a great deal to this industry. The team looks to represent this aspect downtown with “The Oasis,” complete with research and “health maker” labs, yoga on the green and a recreation center.

“I think what distinguished our team’s project was that it used a regional basis for the development which was literally the anchor,” says faculty advisor Frank Russell, “creating a hub for business developments, entrepreneurial activity and culture. I think their winning idea was that it didn’t just deal with that particular site but also the whole region.”

For the past five years, Russell and Dave Neyer have worked with the Cincinnati chapter of the Urban Land Institute to create a local version of the Hines competition, offered for class credit at UC as a way to prepare students for the national competition. With UC making it to the finals of the national Hines competition for the first time, it’s clear they’ve done just that.

Graduate students Campbell and Maney took that class and competed in the 2017 student competition. The next year, they competed in the national student competition alongside current teammates Varsha Iyengar and Lorrin Kline. They received an honorable mention, placing in the top 11 of 130 submissions.

“Doing the national competition last year, I knew better what to make us succeed,” Campbell explains. “We’re a very holistic team, and we communicate everything. It was such a team effort.”

The winners will be announced on April 4, but Campbell says the team is happy to even make it to the finals.

“It was a great experience,” she says. “There’s no way that anything could have been done without having such a great team. The fact that we’re even a finalist is amazing. We’re so grateful. Everything that happened is because the team worked so well together. I can’t express that enough. It’s definitely super rewarding to be a part of something like that.”

WCPO: Can UC students help connect the riverfront to the Central Business District?