2012 Curry Stone Design Prize Names 5 Winners for Year 5

BEND, Ore., Oct. 23, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- The Curry Stone Foundation has announced the winners of the 2012 Curry Stone Design Prize. In a departure from previous years, and in honor of the fifth anniversary of the Prize, five winners will share the award equally, each recognized with $25,000 for their work as social design pioneers. An awards ceremony will take place on November 15, 2012, at Harvard Graduate School of Design, followed the next day with a forum of presentations by the 2012 winners and panel discussions with a curated group of respondents. The awards ceremony and daylong forum are free and open to the public.

The Curry Stone Design Prize celebrates social design pioneers and the power of design as a critical force for improving lives and strengthening communities.

The Winners of the 2012 Curry Stone Design Prize are: Center for Urban Pedagogy, aka CUP (Brooklyn, New York), Liter Of Light (Manila, Philippines), MASS Design (Boston, MA), Riwaq (Ramallah, Palestine), and Jeanne van Heeswijk (Rotterdam, Netherlands).

The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) collaborates with students, policy experts and community advocates, and designers and artists to explain complex urban-planning processes and policy-making decisions through understandable visual communications and multimedia toolkits. Founded in 1997 by artist and designer Damon Rich and seven other co-founders and directed today by Christine Gaspar, CUP provides practical information to groups who need it most: immigrants, public-housing residents, and at-risk youth, to name a few.

Filipino entrepreneur and activist Illac Diaz created Liter of Light to provide residents of informal settlements in his country with a cheap daytime lighting source that can be produced and distributed locally. The solution is Diaz's figurative "liter of light," made simply from a clear plastic bottle that is filled with water and mounted in a metal tile. The tile is then easily installed in a typical metal roof. The inexpensive "bulb" disperses sunlight 360 degrees and lights up a room without need for kerosene or inventive wiring. Liter of Light is the first organization to widely distribute the solar bottle bulbs, and through a combination of social networking, open-source sharing, and hands-on building the organization has placed tens of thousands of these solar bottle bulbs in informal settlements worldwide.

Model of Architecture Serving Society—aka MASS Design—is a Boston-based architecture firm that has created an alternative practice designing healthcare facilities in resource-limited settings, primarily in developing countries emerging from crisis. MASS brings high-quality design and implementation to where it is most needed, and at the same time brings other disciplines into architectural work (its core team includes public health professionals with no background in design). MASS's immersive process with their client identifies the broader needs of a community to ensure that the buildings aren't just beautiful, healthy and functional, but that they also "amplify" the mission of the client (often an NGO) who has commissioned them.

Riwaq Centre for Architectural Conservation has spent more than two decades documenting Palestinian heritage and culture through holistic restoration of the built environment. Riwaq sees architectural restoration as a social and economic incubator; the projects it facilitates serve the public, create jobs, and strengthen community identity. Riwaq has done pioneering work in a region greatly affected and fragmented by conflict, completing complicated, multi-stakeholder projects on a large scale in the face of many logistical and sociopolitical challenges. For Riwaq, conservation and historic restoration are not about creating a museum piece—they are tools for social and economic advancement.

Jeanne van Heeswijk is an artist who facilitates the creation of lively and diversified public spaces, typically from disenfranchised or derelict sites. Her socially engaged practice generates new forms of encounter while challenging bureaucratic conventions and acquired rules. Van Heeswijk's work presents a fresh understanding of the role of art in the design world—that art actively works in shaping society, and that the ultimate artistic production lies within the evolution of the people involved in the process.

"The mission of the Curry Stone Design Prize is a wide mission of social transformation," said Emiliano Gandolfi, Secretary of the Prize. "It's not about style anymore, it's about an approach. The Curry Stone Design Prize is one of the institutions that is enabling this transformation."

The Curry Stone Design Prize award ceremony and forum at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is a joint presentation of the Loeb Fellowship and the Department of Urban Planning and Design.

The awards ceremony on November 15th, at 6:30pm EST, will be live-streamed for global viewing. In addition to the cash award, each winner will be the subject of a short documentary video produced by the Curry Stone Design Prize Foundation. The videos will premiere at the awards ceremony and simultaneously posted online.

"The aim of the Prize is as much about sharing best practices of these emerging design disciplines as it is about the actual prize," said Chee Pearlman, Curator of the award. "Each of these emerging practices is taking on critical challenges, and in the films we can share their stories."

The 2012 Curry Stone Design Prize has partnered with Domus Magazine to further raise awareness of its winners. The Prize sponsored a special event hosted by Domus at the Venice Architecture Biennale in August 2012, and the short documentaries on each winner will be featured on the magazine's new iPad App and on its website.

ABOUT THE CURRY STONE DESIGN PRIZE
Clifford Curry, an architect and recognized pioneer in senior housing, and Delight Stone, a historic archaeologist and social justice activist, launched the Curry Stone Design Prize in 2008 to champion designers as a force for social change. Now in its fifth year, the Prize recognizes both individuals and firms who use innovative design strategies to address critical issues such as food scarcity, clean water access, disaster response, housing rights, health care, education, post-conflict development and peace-keeping.

The recipient of the first $100,000 Grand Prize in 2008 was Luyanda Mpahlwa, part of South Africa's vanguard of new designers who are re-envisioning the post-apartheid architectural landscape. Mpahlwa designed low-cost housing that featured an ingenious use of sandbags as thermal insulation that are simple enough to be constructed by unskilled workers. In 2009 Alejandro Echeverri and Sergio Fajardo were awarded the Grand Prize for a bold and ambitious public works plan for the Colombian city of Medellín that helped revitalize its poorest neighborhoods. Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) won the Grand Prize in 2010 with a microcapital industry in Rwanda focused on the sustainable manufacturing of affordable feminine-hygiene products made from locally sourced banana fiber. In 2011 Hsieh Ying-Chun, a leading Taiwanese architect, won the Grand Prize for his work throughout Asia, training locals in areas decimated by natural disasters to build contextually appropriate, resilient dwellings.

Previous Curry Stone Design Prize Winners also include Atelier d'Architecture Autogeree, Elemental, Shawn Frayne, FrontlineSMS, Anna Heringer, Wes Janz, Maya Pedal, Marjetica Potrc, Antonio Scarponi, and Transition Network. Each was awarded $10,000.

Documentaries about each of the 14 past prizewinners are shared on the Prize website.

Nominees for the Curry Stone Design Prize are selected by an anonymous, rotating group of social impact leaders representing broad fields of design, as well as humanitarian advocates from related disciplines. Emphasis is placed on emerging projects and ideas that may not have yet been taken to scale.

The 2012 guest jurors include Joseph Grima, Elvira Dyangani Ose and Teddy Cruz. Joseph Grima is a Milan-based architect and curator and Editor of the architecture and design magazine Domus. Elvira Dyangani Ose is Curator of International Art at London's Tate Modern. Teddy Cruz is a professor of Public Culture and Urbanism at the University of California, San Diego, where he founded the Center for Urban Ecologies.

2012 Curry Stone Design Prize Forum

Awards Ceremony
Thursday November 15, 2012
Harvard Graduate School of Design
5 Winners, $25,000 each

Curry Stone Design Prize Presentations
Friday, November 16, 2012
Harvard Graduate School of Design

2012 Curry Stone Design Prize Winners

2012 Jury
Joseph Grima, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Teddy Cruz,
and Clifford Curry

Prize Founders: Clifford Curry and Delight
Stone, Bend, OR.

Prize Secretary: Emiliano Gandolfi, architect
and curator, co-founder of Cohabitation Strategies,
Rotterdam.

Prize Curator: Chee Pearlman, design editor and
curator, principal of Chee Company, New York.

Senior Prize Advisors: Rahul Mehrotra, Chair, Urban
Planning and Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design;
Cameron Sinclair, architect and co-founder of Architecture
for Humanity.

Past Curry Stone Design Prize Winners

CURRY STONE DESIGN PRIZE FORUM
Harvard Graduate School of Design

Curry Stone Design Prize Awards Ceremony
Thursday, November 15, 2012, 6:30 – 8:30pm
Harvard GSD, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Free to the public. RSVP: [email protected]

Curry Stone Design Prize Forum with 2012 Winners and Respondents at the GSD
Friday, November 16, 2012, 10:00am-4:00pm
Harvard GSD, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA
Free to the public. RSVP: [email protected]

For more information about the Curry Stone Design Prize, Events, and Winners, go to www.currystonedesignprize.com, Twitter: @currystoneprize, Facebook: http://on.fb.me/R9kt1T

Press Contact:
Diana Bianchini
Di Moda Public Relations
310.288.0077 | [email protected]

SOURCE Curry Stone Design Prize

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