Rebuild By Design: Building Resilience along the Atlantic Coast

The details of ten final design proposals for the Rebuild By Design competition were announced on April 3, 2014. Writing for New York magazine, Justin Davidson introduces the idea behind the competition, which has engaged ten design and planning firms over the past several months in competition for the design of coastal resilience projects. According to Davidson’s explanation, “the competition helps elevate resilience to a national priority. The concept is only vaguely understood, but it means turning back nature’s assaults where possible, and living with them everywhere else.”

After revealing their proposals, the ten finalists of the Rebuild by Design competition have a chance to “a slice of the federal government’s $4 billion disaster-recovery pie.”

The competition is the work of the Hurricane Sandy Task Force, though the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The HUD website describes Rebuild By Design as “a multi-stage regional design competition to promote resilience for the Sandy-affected region.” Moreover, “The goal of the competition is two-fold: to promote innovation by developing regionally-scalable but locally-contextual solutions that increase resilience in the region, and to implement selected proposals with both public and private funding dedicated to this effort.”

The New York magazine article includes a slideshow of renderings from each of the ten final projects. Included among the finalists are big names like Bjarke Ingels Group, MIT, OMA, PennDesign/OLIN, and WXY.

The finalists were announced in November. According to an article by Karissa Rosenfield in Arch Daily at the time, the finalists have since collaborated with local and regional stakeholders to further develop their projects.