The Bluegrass and Beyond

Joe Riley is an evangelist for historic preservation, good urban design and proven strategies for making cities more livable and economically successful.

He founded the national Mayors’ Institute for City Design. The Joseph P. Riley Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Studies at the College of Charleston is named for him. But Riley’s best credential is his day job: since 1975, for an unprecedented nine terms, he has been the mayor of Charleston, S.C.

People who know Charleston often remark on what a great city it is — the beautiful waterfront, the Spoleto arts festival and the colorfully painted historic homes. Those old enough to remember what the city used to be like talk about how much it has improved.

During Riley’s tenure, Charleston’s annual tourist trade has increased from 1.7 million to 4.4 million visitors. At the same time, the city has often made lists of the best places to live and do business.

Riley was in Lexington last Wednesday to speak to an overflow crowd at the Downtown Public Library. Many civic leaders were there, as well as all four candidates for mayor.

With a rapid-fire PowerPoint presentation that lasted for more than an hour, Riley flashed slide after slide showing Charleston’s transformation from the time when “our downtown almost died.”

The pictures showed dozens of dilapidated buildings restored to elegance and commercial success; modest but well-designed public housing so attractive that expensive condos were later built across the street; neighborhoods and commercial streets rescued from neglect by city leaders who demanded and got high-quality private development; an elegant public park on what was once a waterfront eyesore.

“A big challenge was this vacant lot right in the middle of downtown,” Riley said at one point, prompting the crowd to erupt in laughter. “Oh, you have one of those, too?”

A key factor in Charleston’s success has been historic preservation. “We work hard to keep the bulldozers out,” he said.

Historic preservation hasn’t been so much about preserving the past — “we’re not a movie set or a theme park,” Riley said — but about creating an authentic, irreplaceable and human-scaled environment where people naturally want to be. The city also insists that new development be well-designed, well-built and, well, worthy of being in Charleston.

That means having effective laws and regulations, but also the kind of professional architectural review processes Lexington lacks. Such a process helps ensure that new development is appropriate, well-designed and in the best interests of the entire city and not just an individual developer or property owner.

“Try not to plop things down,” Riley said of new development. “Make it work. Make it fit.”

Excellence is often achieved with that last 5 percent of effort, the mayor noted. He repeatedly gave examples of using his political skills to make sure old buildings were saved, money was found to restore them and proposed new construction added to rather than detracted from the rest of the city. Riley said he once called then-President Bill Clinton to insist that a new federal building respect Charleston’s downtown esthetic.

“There’s never an excuse to build anything that doesn’t add to the beauty of a city,” Riley said, acknowledging that “the political land mines are all over the place.”

Successful cities put a lot of emphasis on beautiful public space that attracts people. “The things of value are increasingly the things we own together,” he said. “When you build a great public realm, the private money and development will follow.”

Riley’s strong leadership is controversial; he has always had a re-election opponent, and last time he had three. But Riley’s approach has clearly worked for Charleston and most of its citizens. He was re-elected for an eighth time in 2007 with 64 percent of the vote.

City-building is a complicated stew, but the principles Riley outlined are simple: vision, leadership, and a commitment to long-term value for the entire city rather than just short-term profit for individuals.

When Lexington has followed those principles, it has enjoyed some of its greatest success: creating the Urban Services Boundary in 1958; restricting rural lot sizes in 1964 and 1999; starting the Purchase of Development Rights program in 2000; and creating historic districts over the past 50 years (often, though, after significant damage was already done.)

Lexington has failed when it ignored those principles and allowed tacky, vinyl-box housing, commercial sprawl, haphazard architecture and, since the 1950s, the destruction of classic downtown buildings to make way for parking lots, drab concrete boxes and ego-driven glass towers.

“Our success as a culture, economic and otherwise, will depend on our cities,” Riley said. “We must treat them as precious heirlooms that we inherit and hold in trust for future generations.”

Lexington’s political and business leaders often talk about the importance of the “creative class” in building a vibrant 21st-century economy.

It makes sense that an economy based on innovation and technology needs young, creative, well-educated innovators.

On the Sunday after Christmas, I spent the afternoon listening to members of the creative class — a dozen or so of the smartest young people Kentucky has produced in recent years.

We sat in a circle of chairs inside the Miller House, a little-known landmark of modernist architecture that a small group of fans rescued from vandals, restored and is struggling to preserve.

Most of the people there were in their late 20s or early 30s. Some were former Gaines Fellows at the University of Kentucky. Others were Lexington natives, spouses and significant others with educations from Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They were architects, educators and entrepreneurs in the arts and technology. Some were back in Lexington after a few years in larger cities. Others were home visiting family, on break from successful careers in New York and Boston. I could sense, though, that they hoped to return to Lexington. Someday. If only.

The question that brought them together was this: How can Lexington do a better job of keeping its brightest young people and attracting more? Rather than suffering from brain drain, how could this city become a brain magnet?

Several of them had begun the discussion Labor Day weekend at a retreat organized by former Gaines Center director Dan Rowland and Vice Mayor Jim Gray. After I left, the talk continued at a reception at Gray’s home.

Among the laments: Lexington doesn’t have enough economic opportunities, especially in technology. UK and other universities aren’t integrated enough into civic life. Too few people are risk-takers. Lexington leaders look elsewhere for innovation but often don’t recognize it under their noses. The local arts community is vibrant — and growing more so — but lacks the acceptance and philanthropy found elsewhere.

Their expectations weren’t unrealistic. They didn’t want to change Lexington so much as to expand its horizons. Things are moving in the right direction, they said, just more slowly than in many of the cities Lexington competes with economically.

What they loved about Lexington was its beauty, people and authentic culture. It’s a place big enough to have world-class amenities yet small enough that an individual can make a difference.

They loved Lexington’s quality of life, livable neighborhoods and the potential of its human-scale downtown. They wondered why there wasn’t more connectivity with Louisville and Cincinnati, which are so close yet seem so far away.

They saw great potential for reviving parts of town that have seen better days, such as the Distillery District and old Northside neighborhoods. They wondered why Lexington doesn’t do more to capitalize on local treasures, such as McConnell Springs, the Kentucky Horse Park and the Miller House.

None of these young professionals seemed to be horse people. Yet they were excited about next fall’s Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, and they were surprised more people in Lexington seem not to be.

These young people understood that an international event like the Games can have a transformative effect on a city. But when they started talking about how people should take advantage of it, there was an interesting dichotomy.

Several of those living here said they were confused about how they could harness the Games to develop or promote their slice of Lexington. Who is in charge? What is the process?

It doesn’t really matter, the people living in Boston and New York replied. Organize your own events, activities and celebrations around the Games. While it’s nice to be part of the official program, it’s hardly necessary. Seize the day and put your stamp on it. Just do it.

It’s good to read books and listen to consultants. But if Lexington really wants to tap the creative class, we must recognize and listen more to its members. Many of them are right under our noses. And many more would like to come home, if given the right opportunity.

Richard Levine has heard all of the arguments about why solar energy won’t work in Kentucky.

And he has been defying them for three decades.

Levine, a University of Kentucky architecture professor, designed and built one of the nation’s first solar homes on 32 acres he bought in 1974 near Raven Run Nature Sanctuary. He has been living there ever since.

Last month, he finished adding new high-tech solar panels to the roof of a studio next to his home that will make both buildings “net zero.” That means, over the course of a year, the photo-voltaic cells will produce as much electricity as the buildings consume.

“But to do it I may have to unplug my hot tub and convince my daughter to turn off her computer at night,” Levine said with a smile.Raven Run House has been written about in books, magazines and architecture journals all over the world but has received little attention in Kentucky. That’s mostly because Levine’s late wife, artist Anne Kemper Frye, who died in 2005, wanted privacy.

Levine, co-director of UK’s Center for Sustainable Cities, is continuing to use his live-in laboratory to explore new home design and energy technologies he thinks will become more important as utility rates rise and environmental concerns grow.

“All of these things are pointing to the fact that in the coming years we’re not going to be building houses the way we do now,” he said. “It’s coming very quickly.”

Levine was a young architect in the early 1970s when the Arab oil embargo and the fledgling environmental movement first got Americans thinking about renewable energy.

At the time, solar energy was the province of scientists and hippies; few architects paid much attention to it. Levine thought buildings would need to become more energy-efficient, so he decided to explore the possibilities.

He spent nearly a year researching and designing his home to use both kinds of solar energy: “passive,” in which design exploits the sun’s natural light and warmth, and “active,” in which mechanical devices capture and store it.

Levine began work on the house in 1975. The project took eight years, mostly because he and students did most of the construction — and because the Levine family lived there the whole time. He has never figured the total cost, but said, “It wasn’t terribly expensive.”

The design Levine created was a 40-foot cube, sliced diagonally to create a large hexagonal surface. That surface faced south at a 54-degree angle, the optimal position to catch winter sunlight.

On that 32-foot sloping surface, Levine installed vertical rows of solar collectors, which warmed air and stored it in bins of crushed stone in the basement to provide heat with a system he patented. He alternated those collectors with rows of narrow windows he called “sundows” that let in natural light and warmth.

A greenhouse at the base of the slope also helps light and heat the home, and it provides a year-round growing environment for vegetables and exotic plants.

The tall sides of the home that face northeast and northwest have many small, square windows of three kinds. Double-layered glass windows provide views and light. Screened ones provide ventilation; cool night breezes coming up from Raven Run Creek make summer air conditioning unnecessary. Translucent windows made of six layers of plastic (for insulation) light each room.

The home’s walls were well-insulated by 1970s standards, but the materials weren’t nearly as good as the super-insulation available today. Likewise, most of today’s high-efficiency windows didn’t exist then, so Levine designed and made his own window systems.

Levine installed two composting toilets in the house, which have worked well with minimal maintenance. There are several experimental energy systems he installed — but rarely needs to use — such as a geothermal heat pump, a highly efficient wood-burning boiler and an air-circulating fireplace.

Levine’s decision to take 1970s technology as far as he could resulted in a home that is as weird-looking outside as it is strikingly beautiful inside.

The living area is open and airy, with white walls, oak woodwork and a central oak staircase that provides a visual centerpiece. Variously shaped rooms on multiple levels open to the staircase, making the 3,000-square-foot space seem larger.

Levine just added 30 new photo-voltaic panels to the roof of his studio to generate electricity. The panels have micro-inverters that make solar-generated power usable at a lower cost than old inverter systems did. Each panel’s performance can be monitored by computer; you can see it from a link on Levine’s Web site: www.cscdesignstudio.com.

He doesn’t need batteries to store the power his photo-voltaic cells produce, because “net metering” allows him to feed power to his utility company on sunny days and draw from it on cloudy ones. Over the course of a year, it should balance out.

Some utilities, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, buy from small renewable power producers, allowing them to make a profit. In Central Kentucky, though, utilities are only required to swap power, so the best a solar-generating homeowner can do is break even.

Levine thinks changing Kentucky’s net-metering law to allow producers to profit would encourage more solar generation by both homes and commercial buildings.

In addition to Levine’s studio renovation, construction is wrapping up on a weekend home he designed on Herrington Lake for another UK professor. It has well-insulated walls and windows and a $10,000 photo-voltaic system that will make the home net-zero.

“That’s really very little to pay for energy independence,” Levine said. Solar systems are getting better and cheaper all the time, and tax credits provide attractive incentives for installing them.

Once the first energy crisis passed in the early 1980s, Americans went back to then-cheap fossil fuels and paid little attention to renewable energy. European countries have become the technology leaders.

“It’s just amazing how far ahead they are in many ways; even China is ahead of us,” Levine said. “It’s very sad, really. They used to come here for ideas.”

About 40 percent of all U.S. energy is consumed by buildings. Levine thinks “green” architecture for new buildings — and retrofitting of old ones — will become more popular as energy prices rise. Homes offer some of the best opportunities for better design, better insulation and small-scale renewable energy systems.

“I think it’s something that any rational homeowner will want to consider,” Levine said with the pride of a pioneer. “I can’t see a better, more guaranteed investment.”

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The old building doesn’t look like much, standing across East Third Street from a demolition site and the King Cobras motorcycle club. A small sign in a window behind a steel-bar security door says: LOT Parrish Rash.

Since early this year, it has been the Land of Tomorrow, an occasional gallery, and the workshop of Parrish Rash & van Dissel, a small company with big ambitions.

PR&vD hopes to encourage artists and industrial designers around the world to innovate by creating new and more profitable ways for them to produce and market their work.

At the company’s workshop last week, there were three projects under way: A high-design chaise being made of Styrofoam and urethane for a Vienna art museum; a stage set for The xx, a British rock band; and another UK professor’s project that involves creating a LED lighting system for a large model of a planned community in China that will be exhibited in Germany.

Upcoming work includes a piece for a show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris and two pieces for a show at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Later this month, LOT will bring collectors from across the country together with an international group of designers represented by the NOUS Gallery of London, England. The event will include a mixed-media show called Boys and Their Toys, which will be on display from Oct. 30 to Nov. 8. The opening reception Oct. 30 at 7 p.m. is open to the public.

Why would these collectors and designers travel thousands of miles for an event in Lexington?

“High-end collectors are looking for new places to discover work,” said LOT founder Drura Parrish. The event will include a dinner, an afternoon at Keeneland and plenty of bourbon. “You sell the destination, not the art.”

It also didn’t hurt that one of the British gallery’s principals, designer Melissa Woolford, is originally from Evansville, Ind., across the Ohio River from Parrish’s hometown of Henderson.

Good connections and a “why not?” attitude have enabled Parrish and his business partner, Rives Rash, to build an international reputation over the past six years by working with contemporary artists and architects to produce their designs. Their work has appeared at such venues as New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s MAK Center and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Parrish and Rash are faculty members at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design. They’re also workshop wizards who never outgrew playing with sticks and glue.

“The reputation got out there that if you wanted to do something crazy, there’s these guys from Virginia and Kentucky who will help you do something crazy,” said Parrish, who, like Rash, earned a graduate degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture.

During the past 15 years, technology has revolutionized architecture and design. Parrish, 33, and Rash, 30, have created a niche by exploring the possibilities of new design geometries and materials.

The company’s newest partner, Bart van Dissel, 55, a former Harvard Business School professor and McKinsey & Co. consultant, sees an opportunity for PR&vD to change the economics of design by connecting designers, manufacturers and customers.

That means working with designers to build prototypes and figure out manufacturing processes and costs. PR&vD would do some manufacturing itself and outsource some work to other Kentucky manufacturers.

In addition to fine art, PR&vD is interested in making furniture and household items — really, any object that might be improved by innovative design.

“There needs to be a democratization of design,” Parrish said. “People used to not give a damn about design because they couldn’t afford it.” That is changing as high-design items show up on the shelves of such retailers as IKEA and Target.

Designers haven’t been well-served by traditional retail models, where mass production and big sales volume are necessary and retailers get as much as 60 percent of the price. It gives designers little incentive to innovate or take risks.

For that reason, PR&vD also is interested in exploring new retail models, from online sales to distribution through museum stores.

“The key point is to shift the way the designers do business,” Parrish said. “Our paradigm is simple: Put designers first, and they become the brand.”

PR&vD has begun making several products for sale on www.etsy.com, an arts and crafts site. They include flatware, lamps, chairs and decorative items made from a mix of urethane and tree limbs salvaged from last winter’s ice storm.

There are limits to what can be made in PR&vD’s rented workshop, which also must accommodate the building owner’s bass boat. It is moved around the room as space is needed.

“It adds soul to the workshop,” Parrish said of the bass boat.

“And it reminds us that we don’t go fishing enough,” van Dissel added.

Parrish thinks Kentucky is an ideal place for the kind of creative, specialized manufacturing that PR&vD has in mind. The state has a wealth of aluminum and plastics fabricators who located here for the auto industry but could use more work.

“Kentucky, more than any place I know, is tied to making and doing,” he said. “If we don’t do it as a profession, we often do it as a hobby. It’s just what we do.”

After all, look what PR&vD has done so far with limited equipment in an old building on East Third Street. In the land of tomorrow, what’s important are ideas — and people with the knowledge and connections to make them work.

The “AU” in AU Associates stands for “Adaptive Use.”

But if you remember the periodic table of elements from science class, Au also is the symbol for gold.

Holly Wiedemann has created gold for her Lexington development company — and golden opportunities for several Kentucky communities — through a complex alchemy of historic preservation, architectural innovation and creative finance.

AU Associates specializes in restoring once-beautiful old buildings by adapting them for new, economically sustainable uses. Most were once schools, rich in architecture and memories, and are now affordable apartments that put abandoned buildings to good use — and onto the tax rolls.

Wiedemann is working with First Presbyterian Church and Central Bank in downtown Lexington to restore a run-down Market Street apartment building from the 1800s into 10 attractive apartments that will rent for $300 to $600 a month. Old woodwork and fireplaces are being reused, architectural details restored.

“The proportions are comfortable to be in, and out each window you can see church steeples and gardens” of neighboring historic homes, she said.

That project is one of several now under way, Wiedemann said, representing $8.6 million in investment and providing 150 jobs.

“They have the right angle on the historic-preservation argument: It is first and foremost an urban-redevelopment argument,” Michael Speaks, dean of the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, which includes the architecture school, said of Wiedemann’s company.

“Her firm is one of the few that is taking historic properties and using creative financing to give them new life and make communities better,” Speaks said.

Wiedemann, 53, comes naturally to her love of history and old buildings.

A great-great grandfather, George Wiedemann, started Wiedemann brewery in Newport. A great-grandfather, J.D. Purcell, started Purcell Department Store, which was in a grand old building on Lexington’s Main Street that was demolished in 1978 to make way for the Radisson hotel. “Boy, that would be a great building to have now,” she said.

Wiedemann grew up on the family farm in Scott County called The Hollys, for which she was named. The farmhouse, built in 1789, gave her an appreciation for the beauty and durability of old buildings.

After earning a degree in landscape architecture and urban planning at the University of Georgia, she worked for a major developer in Tulsa, Okla. She realized she would need to learn more about real estate finance to do the kinds of projects she wanted to do.

That led her to Duke University in North Carolina, where she earned a master’s in business administration and met her husband, Bart van Dissel, then a doctoral student. They moved to Boston, where he taught at Harvard Business School and she worked for Winn Development, a pioneer in adaptive reuse of historic buildings.

“That, for me, was the Ph.D. level education” in historic tax credits and unconventional finance, she said. It also sparked her interest in building affordable housing.

Through consulting work, Wiedemann raised the money to start AU Associates after she and her husband moved to Lexington in 1992. The firm’s first major project was remodeling the old Midway School into 24 apartments for seniors.

The Irvine mayor’s wife saw the project and got Wiedemann to do a similar one in the Estill County town. Since then, AU Associates has done other school-to-apartment renovations, with more planned in Glasgow, Winchester, Beattyville and Buffalo in LaRue County.

“These old schools are often beautiful buildings that were built to last and are located in lovely residential areas,” Wiedemann said. “Many of the people who live there now taught or went to school there and have wonderful memories.”

The firm converted an ornate former YMCA built in 1913 in downtown Louisville into 58 market-priced apartments and St. Francis High School. And it is turning a former tuberculosis hospital in Ashland into 34 apartments for domestic abuse victims.

AU Associates’ projects often are complex because they use historic tax credits, partnerships and creative financial arrangements. “We cobble together multiple funding sources to make these projects work,” Wiedemann said. “That’s why a lot of people don’t do this work.”

But the projects work, and there’s a lot of demand for them.

“The growth potential is amazing,” said Johan Graham, who along with Martha Dryden makes up Wiedemann’s core staff. “We really have as much work as we can handle just from the business coming through the door.”

The firm’s offices are on Georgetown Street in a formerly derelict pre-1800 house that AU Associates restored with a contemporary addition. Behind it is the firm’s first start-from-scratch project — ARTEK lofts, which was developed in partnership with neighbors in the Western Suburb Historic District on a formerly blighted lot.

Wiedemann and her husband live at ARTEK, which has impressive views of the downtown skyline and the Henry Clay monument in Lexington Cemetery. Unfortunately, ARTEK came on the market during the recent downtown condo boom and right before the current economic bust. Wiedemann said about half of the 38 units, priced from the low $170,000s to the low $280,000s, remain unsold.

The project’s unique contemporary architecture by Christopher Fuller of K. Norman Berry & Associates in Louisville uses a lot of concrete, steel and brick. Like the historic structures Wiedemann’s firm usually works with, it is built to last.

“In 50 years, it will be qualifying for historic-preservation restoration grants,” Wiedemann said with a smile. “It’s not going anywhere.”

Click on each photo below to enlarge it.

There is no shortage of international  prizes honoring flashy, provocative, beautiful or breathtaking architecture and design.

The new $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize, administered by the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is different.

The first Curry Stone Design Prize was awarded Thursday at the Idea Festival in Louisville to a South African architecture firm that, working without pay, designed and is building 10 houses for poor people in Capetown. The houses are made of timbers of wood and steel and bags filled with sand. They cost less than $7,000 each and can be built by their owners.

Beautiful? Provocative?  Not in the world of architecture. But for a world where it is estimated that 1 billion people — about 15 percent of the population — live in shanties, projects like this have the ability to reshape the way much of humanity lives.

That was the idea when Clifford Curry and his wife, H. Delight Stone, of Oregon decided to create the prize as part of a $5.5 million gift to UK. Curry had been a successful architect, pioneering the design of housing for elderly people. Curry, a UK architecture graduate, wanted to honor breakthrough design ideas that improve the human spirit, increase awareness of the environment or responde to areas of human need.

Like the famous MacArthur “genius” grants, the Curry Stone Prize comes with no strings attached.

“The concept is they can do whatever they darn well please” with the money, Curry said. “These are motivated people. I want them to figure that out.”

MMA Architects principal Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, was unable to get a U.S. visa to attend the ceremony because of his anti-Apartheid work in South Africa years ago. But in a telephone interview, Mpahlwa said he expects to use some of the money to continue this sort of work, as well to expand a scholarship program for architects he has started in South Africa.

“There is a lot of need for these projects,” he said. “I am starting to look at what other materials combinations and types we could use. We want to take part in a body of knowledge that contributes to local housing situations.”

MMA was chosen from among five finalists; the others attended the ceremony and received $10,000 cash awards. Thirty anonymous nominators around the world suggested candidates, and a panel of judges met in New York in July to choose four finalists and a winner.

David Mohney, a College of Design faculty member, former dean and secretary of the prize, said MMA was chosen because it is an example of using conventional architecture in an unconventional way to promote social good. But all of the finalists had amazing stories to tell.

Wes Janz, 55, an associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana, helps people in third-world slums build well-designed housing from scavenged materials. Marjetica Potrc, 55, an artist and architect from Slovenia, works in impoverished communities. One project she discussed was a toilet that doesn’t need water that has been used in shanty communities in Guatemala. Antonio Scarponi, 34, an architect based in Venice, Italy, uses architecture and multimedia arts to illustrate social and political lines that unite and divide people.

The most unconventional finalist was Shawn Frayne, 27, an inventor in Hawaii, who has invented the first non-turbine wind-powered generator. It is small and looks like a violin bow. It uses wind to create very cheap electricity that can replace batteries. It can be used to power lamps, run small refrigerators and charge cell phones.

“Harder problems make for better inventions,” said Frayne, who created the generator after visiting Haiti and thinking that poor people there needed cheaper and safer sources of light than kerosene lanterns. “The problems in emerging countries are no longer isolated, but are showing up everywhere in the world.”

Emiliano Gandolfi, an Italian architect who led a panel discussion of the finalists at the Idea Festival, said the Curry Stone Design Prize recognizes a new sensibility among architects and designers, especially young ones like him, that design is about more than creating beautiful things. It can be about improving the human experience at all levels.

“What we are discovering is a new sensibility,” he said.

Michael Speaks, dean of the UK College of Design, said he’s glad to see the university on the forefront of that movement.

“Many people understand design to be the engine of innovation,” he said. “This prize recognizes social innovation and not just commercial innovation.”

A South African architecture firm that has pioneered simple, affordable housing that poor Capetown families can largely build themselves has won the first $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize.

The new prize, administered by the University of Kentucky’s College of Design, is intended to recognize breakthrough work being done around the world that uses design to accomplish humanitarian goals.

MMA Architects of Capetown is headed by Luyanda Mpahlwa, 49, and Mphethi Morojele, 45. It came up with a design for a house made of timber supports and sandbags that a family or community can construct for less than $7,000.  The firm is helping a Capetown neighborhood build 10 of the structures.

MMA Architects was one of five finalists for the award, and the only one not able to attend the announcement today at the Idea Festival in Louisville. Because of post-911 security, Mpahlwa was unable to get a U.S. visa because he had been imprisoned years ago when blacks were resisting white rule in South Africa.

The other finalists, who will receive $10,000 prizes, are Shawn Frayne, inventor of the world’s first non-turbine wind-powered generator; Wes Janz, architect and associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana; artist and architect Marjetica Potre; and Antonio Scarponi, an Italian architect and multimedia artist.  All have used design to help solve health and housing problems in poor, developing parts of the world.

Click here to view videos of each finalist’s work.

Clifford Curry, co-founder of the prize, said there are no restrictions on how the winners use the prize money.

“The concept is they can do whatever they darn well please,” he said. “These are motivated people. I want them to figure that out.”

Beverly Fortune’s story Tuesday and my column Wednesday gave an overview of three alternative design concepts for CentrePointe that were developed over the weekend by students at the University of Kentucky’s College of Design working with prominent architects and designers from UK, Los Angeles and Chicago.

The goal of the 48-hour workshop wasn’t to develop finished designs or exact plans. It was to look at ways the 1.7-acre block could be used to accomplish the goals developer Dudley Webb has stated as well as to create inviting street-level space and a signature piece of architecture. The main goal, though, was to stimulate thinking and explore possibilities.

Here are some of the renderings the three teams came up with during the workshop, which was organized by Michael Speaks, the dean of the college, and architecture faculty member Drura Parrish. The workshop also included advisers from UK’s Historic Preservation Program.

The first group of concept designs was developed by a team led by UK faculty members Liz Swanson and Mike McKay. Swanson and McKay have been based in New Orleans for the past three years leading a UK design studio there. The second group was developed by the team led by Paul Preissner of Chicago, head of Quavirarch and a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The third group was developed by a team led by Heather Flood and Ramiro Diaz Granados of Los Angeles, partners in the design firm of F-Lab and faculty members at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. Click on each photo to enlarge it.