2008 Metropolis Next Generation® Design Prize Announced!

The fifth annual Next Generation® event, sponsored by Duravit, Geberit, Herman Miller, Maharam, and Sherwin-Williams occurred last night in San Francisco at the BATH+BEYOND Showroom. Partygoers celebrated the winner of the 2008 Next Generation® Prize—architect and college professor, Eric Olsen.

Responding to the competition’s theme of water, the San Francisco-based architect was awarded $10,000 for his project, Solar Water Disinfecting Tarpaulin. The tarpaulin is a vessel for both transporting and purifying water that may be deployed in disaster areas, developing urban zones, rural regions, and anyplace where clean water is otherwise inaccessible. It is lightweight, expandable, and comfortable to wear, allowing a greater volume of water to be carried when compared to traditional vessels. Digitally manufactured and designed, the Solar Water Disinfecting Tarpaulin employs a method of water pasteurization that has been approved by the World Health Organization and is based on passive solar radiation.

The judges for the 2008 Next Generation® Design Competition were Lance Hosey, director at William McDonough + Partners; Eric Chan, president of ECCO Design Inc.; Fiona Cousins, principal and mechanical engineer at Arup; and Pam Light, senior vice president at HOK. Metropolis Editor-in-Chief Susan Szenasy moderated the deliberations.

You can learn more about the winner in the May issue of Metropolis.

The 10 Next Generation® runners-up, listed with their entries below, will also be featured in Metropolis issues throughout the year:

2008 Next Generation Design Prize Runners-Up:

Andrea Brivio, Davide Conti, and Fabio Galli (Italy): S_M_L, a housing project designed for the city of Melaka, Malaysia, that harnesses the power of the region’s daily rainfall and uses it to produce electricity and replenish gray water systems.

Yuichi Watanabe, Katz Miyahara, and Yoshi Ogawa (Seattle): Polarfloat, large floating structures in the Arctic Ocean that provide places for polar bears to land as the ice melts.

Joseph Cory, Eyal Malka, and Creative Constructions (Israel): WatAir, a simple unit with an integrated infrastructure for collecting dew and rainwater.

Paul Giacomantonio, Vera Templeman, William Sorich, and Kat Taylor (Pescadero, CA): “The Sun Curve,” a self-sustaining aquaponic food growing system, powered by solar and wind energy.

Charles Lee (San Francisco): Pacific Coast Interpretive Center for Ocean Health, living systems that recycle gray water and runoff by filtering wetlands, cooling the gray water with ocean water, and producing energy with tidal generators.

Lars Mayer (Germany): Sustainable Water, a surface water purification solution that is suited to the needs of developing countries and based on natural processes, using the seeds of the moringa tree.

Robyn Perkins (Boston): emergeMUMBAI, a method of rainwater harvesting that is used as a spatial backbone, a flood mitigation tool, and a water source for redeveloping public housing lands in Mumbai, India.

Gerald Lindner, Jeroen Tacx, Beate Lendt, Peter Heidman, and Martin Oostenrijk (Netherlands) Water Harvester, a double-tubed solar water distiller that is made of polyethylene film and uses a solar-powered water desalinator to make fresh water from polluted or salt water.

Renata Fenton and Enrique Lomnitz (Mexico): Isla Urbana, small, modular, inexpensive and expandable rainwater harvesting systems that can be affordably purchased by the low-income households in Mexico City most affected by the rapidly increasing water shortages.

Thomas Kosbau and Tyson Gillard (New York): Vena: Water Courses from Air, a biomimetic low-cost, low-energy solution for people in climates that lack consistent rainfall or clean ground sources to harvest vast amounts of drinking water from the atmosphere.