Page 11 - CCD-Mag-Summer-Fall-2020

Dig Studio Announces Winner
of Urban Greening Design Competition
Solution demonstrates stormwater capture and urban greening solution for urban development and public right-of-way
Dig Studio Inc., a Denver-based urban design, landscape architecture and
planning firm with an additional office in Phoenix, held a design competition among landscape architecture students attending University of Colorado Denver, Colorado State University, Arizona State University, and University of Arizona. The competition encouraged the exploration of what urban greening might look like at the street scale, if money, policy, and regulations were not a limiting factor. Within the arid climates of Colorado and Arizona, students were encouraged to explore opportunities for greening our streets, storefronts and rooftops that are not current practices. Students were additionally asked to visualize how our streets might adapt to today’s unique physical distancing environment to accommodate business, entertainment, and socialization within a street greening framework.
The winning entry was submitted by Helen Davidoski, a recent graduate of the
CU Denver Master of Landscape Architecture program. She used Knotty Tie, a business located on Santa Fe Drive in Denver, as her prototype site. Helen’s entry translated practices used by tribes in Kenya to an urban environment in the form of an urban bund, a depression dug into the right of way to collect water, allowing it to infiltrate the soil. The urban bund was topped by deck platforms for seating, transforming the stormwater infrastructure to a usable social environment. The addition of successional landscape provides shade, initially through tensile shade structures, and later through mature shade trees with integrated landscape. A circulation plan demonstrated how deck furnishings can be rearranged between daily use and First Friday events.
“Many of the problems we are facing in our urban cores are not technical issues
– they are spatial issues”, said Helen Davidoski, competition winner. “I think re- prioritizing how we use space is important to our health and prosperity. Making room for healthy, well-established trees and vegetation can not only help mitigate effects of urban head island but also restore soil, improve air quality, reduce chronic stress, etc.”
Jury comments stated the design would be “simple, easy to build, and applicable in many locations”, and that it “managed significantly more volume than an average Best Management Practice design, which is important in an area that
is impermeable.”
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