The KC Knot envisions an East Village that embraces socioeconomic and racial diversity, encourages sustainable transportation, and supports equitable job growth and innovation.
The School of Architecture is proud to announce that a team from Carnegie Mellon University has received an Honorable Mention in the 2021 Urban Land Institute (ULI) Hines Student Competition. The team members are SoA students Colleen Duong (B.Arch ‘21), Sean O'Connor (M.Arch ‘21), and Zhecui Zhang (M.Arch ‘21), as well as Heinz College student Sophie Abo, Master of Public Policy, and Tepper School of Business student Raahil Narayan Chandra Reddy, Master of Business Administration. The team was advised by SoA faculty Valentina Vavasis, Special Faculty and Jonathan Kline, Associate Studio Professor.
The team’s entry, titled “The KC Knot,” envisions Kansas City’s East Village as an area that embraces socioeconomic and racial diversity, encourages sustainable transportation, and supports equitable job growth and innovation. A series of complete street axes weave together communities that have been historically segregated by redlining and automobile-oriented development, creating a fertile ground for next-generation life science research and enterprises to take root. Altogether, the KC Knot lays the groundwork for the next generation of equitable economic development in downtown Kansas City.
The jury admired the team’s long-term vision and clear mission statement, which addressed old physical and racial divides. They particularly appreciated the focus on multimodal transportation.
Multiple teams of students from CMU took part in this year’s competition as part of a course led by Vavasis over the winter break. The ULI Hines competition is an intensive annual real estate and urban design competition that was held this year from January 11-25. The purpose of this competition and this course is for cross-disciplinary teams of graduate students to work collaboratively to create a complex urban design and real estate proposal that addresses a real site in North America. Competition entries include a narrative, drawings, and financial pro formas.
The university was most recently recognized in the competition in 2017, when a CMU team made it to the Final Four in the competition for the first time in school history.