Umbrella light scheme wins city's urbanShed design competition

Young-Hwan Choi, a 28-year-old student at the University of Pennsylvania, has been selected the winner of the urbanSHED international design competition to improve the lighting beneath the city's sidewalk construction "sheds."

She will receive $10,000 for the design, shown at the right, and a prototype will be built in Lower Manhattan. The design, which is called "UrbanUmbrella," conjures Gothic cathedral naves by placing thin, curved support struts on poles beneath fluorescent light tubes arrayed in a semi-circular pattern.

The competition received 164 submissions and the jury was composed of Robert LiMandri, the commissioner of the Department of Buildings, Amanda Burden, chair of the City Planning Commission, David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Frank Sciame of the New York Building Congress, Craig Dykers of Snohetta, Jean Oei of Morphosis, Janette Sadik-Kahn, the commissioner of the Department of Transportation, Ada Tolla of LOT-Ek and Craig Michael Schwitter PE of Buro Happold North America.

The design competition was sponsored by the Department of Buildings, the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter, the Alliance for Downtown New York, the New York Building Congress, and the Association for a Better New York Foundation with additional support from the Structural Engineers Association of New York, the city's Department of Transportation and the Department of Planning.

The two other finalists were "urbanCloud," a design submitted by Kevin Erickson, Brodie Bricker, Dan Campbell, Johann Riscahu and Mathew Strack of KNEStudio in New York, and "Tripod MOD(dule)," a design submitted by Jonace Bascon AIA, Derrick Choi AIA, Lynn Hsu RA, Stephen Lew PE and Andrew Stark PE of XChange Architects in Brookline, MA.

In its September 23, 2009 press release, the competition noted that "sidewalk sheds are typically built over public space to protect pedestrians during construction activity, and there are currently more than 6,000 sidewalk sheds installed and in use today at New York City's buildings and construction sites, spanning more than 1,000,000 linear feet."

"Negotiating sidewalks should not be an ominous adventure" and the competition "provides a unique opportunity to rethink how these ubiquitous structures can bring amenity and delight to the pedestrian," Ms. Burden declared in the press release.

"A greener, safer and more street-smart sidewalk shed can transform the urban landscape," said Rick Bell, the executive director of the AIANY. Earlier, in an e-mail to Alan G. Brake for an August 13, 2009 article in The Architect's Newspaper, Mr. Bell had commented that "the current standard shed detail is problematic in regard to safety, sustainability, and the streetscape, and has not changed despite the facts that sheds are much more prevalent and up for longer than before." "Even before the downturn," he continued, "there were many locations where sheds went up and simply did not come down, hurting shops made less visible and playing havoc with any semblance of reasonable urban design quality."

In his article, Mr. Brake observed that "While the all-too-familiar sheds shield pedestrians from debris and rain, they impede the visibility of street-level businesses and create dark corridors at night for pedestrians, and have hardly changed since the 1960s."

Mr. Brake also quoted Mr. LeMandri as observing that the sheds "can also hide the city's breathtaking architecture and one-of-a-kind streetscapes."

"The sidewalk shed - the ubiquitous wooden and steel contraption outside construction sites that symbolize the constant rejuvenation of New York - have largely been unchanged since the 1960s: erector-style frameworks with flat, flappy roofs that residents have used as rain shelters, bike racks and even chin-up apparatus," according to an August 12, 2009 article in The New York Times by Jennifer Lee.