Pig’s Eye Lake at the Mississippi River in St. Paul, a site of historical pollution with significant Indigenous heritage and ecological importance, will serve as a catalyst project of the “Soft-Urban Riverfront: A New Paradigm for Headwater Metropolises” studio.
A team from the University of Minnesota College of Design has been awarded the 2024 SOM Foundation Research Prize and will receive $30,000 to conduct original research that contributes to this year’s topic, “Advancing Toward a Water-Secure Future.” The Research Prize was created in 2018 to cultivate new ideas and meaningful research that addresses the critical issues of our time.
“Soft-Urban Riverfront: A New Paradigm for Headwater Metropolises” is led by Dingliang Yang, Jennifer Yoos, Maura Rockcastle, Ross Altheimer, Roger Cummings, Daniel Carlson, and Changó Cummings (University of Minnesota, The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design [ALI]). Pig’s Eye Lake at the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota, a site of historical pollution with significant Indigenous heritage and ecological importance, will serve as a catalyst project of the “Soft-Urban Riverfront: A New Paradigm for Headwater Metropolises” studio. Through a cross-disciplinary and cross-scalar approach, the studio will work with ecologists, scientists, historians, policymakers, and community stakeholders to create design strategies that enhance biodiversity, public health, and cultural awareness.
“‘Soft-Urban Riverfront’ stood out amongst other proposals in its multi-scalar approach to architecture and landscape design. Working on a particular site near the Mississippi River’s headwaters, students are also asked to analyze the larger watershed and metropolitan context of the site,” mentioned juror Carson Chan. “That the proposal also acknowledged the Dakota Nation’s primacy in this area made clear that the project leads understand that any ecological design research is a continuation of the environmental knowledge gained by those who have lived on this land for far longer than settler colonists and immigrants.”
"We are honored to receive the SOM Foundation Research Prize to develop our work at the intersection of architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, ecology, and cultural heritage. This award will help realize our ambition to investigate and potentially define “soft-urban” riverfront strategies—using the Twin Cities-Mississippi River as a case study—that balance urban life with environmental stewardship. Through this interdisciplinary and collaborative work, we hope to help meet the need for our headwater metropolis to confront historical pollution and spatial justice, industrial impacts, and climate-induced vulnerabilities, ultimately taking on its unique responsibility in safeguarding ecosystems and communities downstream." – Dingliang Yang and Jennifer Yoos
For more details about this project, visit the SOM Foundation website.
