Matthew Moore: A team of students from the University of Arkansas is participating in a prestigious urban design competition. For the first time ever, five U of A students — a mix of seniors and graduate students across a range of disciplines — were chosen as one of 16 finalists out of more than 100 submissions to the Hines Student Competition. The international contest is hosted by the Urban Land Institute. Previous winners include teams from Harvard, MIT, Cornell and Georgia Tech, and the winning team last year was a collaborative group from Harvard and MIT.
Kate Voss is a fifth-year architecture major at the University of Arkansas and one of the members of the Hines Competition team. Jessica Hester is the CEO of Verdant Studio and the professional advisor to the local team. I spoke to the two of them earlier this week, before they were selected as a finalist.
Hester took part in the Hines Competition in graduate school and says it's a big deal for students from Arkansas to participate.
Jessica Hester: They call it the Super Bowl of design competitions. It brings a multidisciplinary team together — a team of five students, typically fifth-year architecture students or graduate students — so you have to be very senior level in your academic career, to develop a not only beautiful urban design solution to a real-world, real-city problem, but also one that pencils, meaning that it financially is a feasible project that can be delivered and executed for a specific amount of money.
Moore: Kate, for you, why was it important to get involved in this?
Kate Voss: I've always been curious about urban planning. And I've also been very curious about how architecture works, kind of in the real world, because we do a lot of theoretical projects when we're in school, but never anything interdisciplinary. So it was a big attraction to the seminar, actually, which I took before we did the competition, to meet people outside of the architecture school, including an MBA candidate who helped us make sure everything penciled and things like that — the logistics that we're not used to having to consider as architecture students.
Moore: Jessica, why is the interdisciplinary element of this so important?
Hester: Because interdisciplinary is how projects get done in the real world. No architecture student is designing an incredible project, funding it, getting it entitled, and building it out of the ground. To achieve a project after graduation, you have to have a team of typically dozens of people involved, if not more, just to get the project from a design concept to shovels in the ground.
Moore: And Kate, your group — the group of students who are involved in this competition — really match that. We've got some architecture students and you're one of those. We've got public administration students. We've got an MBA candidate, a landscape architecture student involved in this. When you're thinking about all of those different categories of kinds of people involved in this, how do you lay out the work? Who's in charge of this, who's in charge of that?
Voss: That's such a good question. In architecture school, and in my experience in architecture so far, in my internships, they've talked a lot about how when you go to architecture school, when you get into it, you kind of become a natural leader of some of those things. You learn the skills of how do we make graphics, how do we design things, but also having difficult discussions with people and learning how to ask questions, and understanding that I'm not going to know a lot of what I might need to to make this project work. So I think the other architect and I — Caleb — he was a fantastic asset. And we all just sat at a big table for hours at a time and worked eight- to 12-hour days, those of us that could, and asked questions when we could. We had a massive wall of drawings and we'd just pin them up all day, and every few hours it would just look totally different. It was a really fantastic experience.
Moore: What about this project motivated you or excited you?
Voss: It's about a mile north of UT, the site that we were given, and a relatively small site as well — less than 30 acres. We were designing a lot of housing, and a lot of it was for students. And so it was really fun as a group of students to get to explore what that might look like. Walkable communities have been some of my favorite parts of living on campus and being a student here, and getting to introduce that and take my favorite pieces of it and make it fit — that was really fun. It was absolutely exhausting, though. Some long days, a lot of back and forth with Muhammad, our MBA candidate, who was working on the financial aspect of it. We'd say, 'Oh, well, we want to make this massive park.' And he's like, 'Well, you can't make money off of a park, actually — let's rein it back in a little bit.' So that back and forth was really exciting and engaging. It's not something we get in architecture school because we tend to design in this vacuum of just designers and just yes-people, and you go as crazy as you can, and that's just not the real world, it’s just not.
Hester: It’s just not.
Moore: Well, talk a little bit about — it sounds like you're using some personal experience, some personal observation of what works in Fayetteville. Austin and Fayetteville are compared often. But when we're thinking about it in this specific example, you're looking at a space near campus that could be used for student housing. What have you learned from your experience being here that you've been able to put into practice for this?
Voss: A lot of it was the implementation of transportation into the plan, and the way that you move through the site that we ended up designing was a big focus. How can you get from point A to point B? How are we prioritizing pedestrians, making a safe environment for something like that while still having plenty of parking? Because I know that's a very real problem that we face here. And so that's kind of where it started, and that kind of got the ball rolling, and we started developing ideas with those things in mind. And then I think you just have to keep going back to where your original heart was with the design, otherwise you kind of lose things along the way. And then you step back and say, 'Oh, are we actually meeting these original goals we set out to?' So it kind of becomes your North Star a little bit in that way.
Moore: What role do you have in what's going on here?
Hester: Officially, I am the students' professional advisor on the competition piece. And prior to that, for the fall semester, co-teacher in the seminar course. It is my job in the seminar course to bring in experts to help educate the students on all these really nuanced pieces that are elements you don't see in design school. We brought in experts in planning, in urban design, in financial pro forma makeup, in sustainability and high-tech energy systems and things like that, so that the students could really layer on different pieces of this once they got into the competition work period.
Moore: Why was it important for you to teach this seminar?
Hester: I participated in the Hines Competition when I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan, and we made it to the final stage — we were one of the four finalists. And that project was the first time, even though I'd had internships and worked in architectural offices over the years, it was the first time I really saw how complex projects are behind the scenes. Even though in a firm you're being asked to draw elevations and details and all the things that go into an architectural set of drawings, you never see how it gets paid for. And oftentimes you're not even exposed to how it gets permitted through the city, and how all of the experts and powers that be influence what that final design is. The impact that the Hines Competition had on me personally was great. I would say it's one of the probably top 10 things that kind of changed my life and formed it and made me really passionate about urban design. I've been deeply involved in the Urban Land Institute in northwest Arkansas, and we finally had this opportunity to bring the seminar course and the competition there. It was my opportunity to basically instill that passion in the students.
Moore: Kate, you're nodding your head a lot as she's talking.
Voss: Yeah. One of the important things in the seminar was, towards the end of the semester — or partway through — we started putting together a practice run for how we might approach a design solution. You gave us a site in Centerton, and I thought that was very, very helpful, because just wrapping your mind around it when somebody says, 'Oh, you're given this many acres and it's an urban planning competition, go' — like, what do you do with that? So I thought that was incredibly helpful in starting to apply some of that as we went. A lot of it was trying to teach strategies as well, and how the complexities of those might resolve in a certain context. So for us that was Centerton and how we might develop a downtown in this big theoretical project. And then working with ULI, we ended up doing a presentation — the five of us went to the ULI conference in Fayetteville, and we got to present there and rub elbows with other people in ULI. It's this big interdisciplinary group of people. I got to shake hands and get business cards from people and just meet so many different people. And the keynote speaker was fantastic. There was so much really awesome stuff going on. It's just been a privilege to be kind of thrown into the deep end of this whole organization I wasn't really aware of before this year.
Moore: Let's talk a little more about how the Hines Competition shaped you as a professional. It seems fair to say it's clearly had an impact on you, because you're still finding ways to be involved in it and show other people how important it can be professionally. You're a busy person. Why are you taking time out of your busy professional life to do this with college students?
Hester: I feel there is no better opportunity to expose college students to what really good design and practice looks like than the Hines Competition, and all of the methods that go into teaching strategy around really good project building. And I'm not talking just urban design, which we absolutely have to achieve when we're thinking about Hines solutions, but also all of these elements that make great place — walkability, how do we bring in small businesses, how do we build a diversity of housing stock that meets the needs of everybody? Not just someone needing an affordable solution and not just someone needing a luxury solution. How do we integrate all of that into really great place and create an identity that is built on the community that's already there? That's what we're teaching in Hines, and I'm really passionate personally about making better practitioners. The Hines Competition allows me to do that. It allows me to share my experience and my expertise, but I learn just as much from these students as they learn from me, if not more. They're constantly surprising me on technology and their innovation. They're not encumbered by decades of being told no, which is lovely. So it really is a win-win for me.
Jessica Hester is the CEO of Verdant Studio. Kate Voss is a fifth-year architecture major at the University of Arkansas and a member of a Hines Competition finalist team. They joined me in the Bruce and Ann Applegate News Studio 2 earlier this week.
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