In our last post, you met the finalists of the 2013 Rudy Bruner Award, a biennial program that recognizes excellence in urban placemaking. This is the first of our dispatches from the field, as the Bruner Foundation team travels the country to examine the five selected projects. During our intensive, two-to-three-day visits to each site, we’re conducting interviews, taking photographs, and gathering information for our selection committee’s meeting in Oklahoma City this coming May, during which they will select the Gold Medal winner.

Congo Street, Dallas, TX

For our first trip, we headed south late last month, trading cold and snowy Boston for the relative warmth of North Texas to visit Congo Street Initiative in Dallas.

The project is among the smallest of this year’s five finalists. Located along a reconstructed block-long street in the East Dallas community of Jubilee Park, it involved the construction of a new “Holding House” and the reconstruction of five existing houses in collaboration with the street’s residents.

Congo Street Site Plan

The idea for the project emerged from a desire to stabilize home ownership for the families who live on Congo Street, many having occupied their homes for generations. The modest 640 square-foot houses, built in the 1920s, were in various states of disrepair, targeted for demolition and redevelopment.

Working with the residents, city, corporate, and nonprofit partners in the Dallas community, buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a local nonprofit community design center that submitted the project, crafted an alternative strategy for redevelopment. It focused on rebuilding the existing homes and street infrastructure over the next five years without displacing a single inhabitant. Staff from bcWORKSHOP and architecture students from the University of Texas at Arlington began working with Congo Street residents in 2008, exploring approaches that would enable them to remain in place without undue financial burden. Read more…

In my previous blog, The Built Environment v 3.0, I observed how the profession of architecture is undergoing a fundamental transformation. The last 100 years of increasing specialization, which has disempowered practitioners and dwindled our scope of influence, has run its course. We are now in a time of reversal, thanks to digital ubiquity, a generation raised in it, and a profusion of processing power harnessed by tools that can drive exploration, parametric analysis, and robotics.

Radical new tools are almost always followed by tectonic shifts in thinking. So it follows that entrenched behaviors perpetuate until someone unlocks new ideas that, in the right circumstances, catch the popular imagination and ultimately seed new ground that creates a “new normal”. This, to me, describes what is happening in architecture today. We are living in a time of great opportunity for our profession, and we need to act accordingly.

In late 2010, I asked my partners for permission to craft the agenda for one of our semi-annual, firm-wide gatherings of design leaders. This became the Perkins+Will Innovation Summit, designed to explore ways of amplifying our creative thought leadership in a global context by building our awareness of people in linked businesses, those who have pioneered new paths in a shifting landscape of practice. Our inspiring speakers set the tone for our explorations:

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