Competition Brief

The brief for this design competition calls for participant designers to imagine new possibilities for the abandoned Ford assembly plant site in St. Paul, Minnesota—which produced vehicles ranging from the Model T to the Ford Ranger from 1925-2011.Successful entries were to incorporate water and energy sustainability and opportunities for worker and housing cooperatives, and that address resiliency factors such as climate change. 

Project Description

Resiliency is integrated into almost every portion of the site and buildings. The watchtower community would be off-grid capable and prepared for extreme weather such as tornados, blizzards and drought. Targeted to meet “Living Community” certification, the co-op community is ideally sized to take advantage of district scale water, power, heating and cooling systems and will be a net positive energy and net zero water neighborhood, Wastewater treated via living machine, is delivered to a headwater plaza where a meandering treatment train creek would perform final filtration before leaving the site. A district biomass / co-gen plant reduces waste and supplements the hydroelectric and building photovoltaic power. Excess methane and or CO2 from the living machine would be captured for reuse in the manufacturing processes. In addition to environmental resiliency, the structure and variety of work, life and play spaces would serve the largest spectrum of families and individuals, regardless of age, race, ability or income. Buildings would be flexible use, engineered lumber and glass constructed to be passive solar and net zero energy. Water capture would meet the individual building and community’s needs.  The design of this co-op community revolves around Minnesota’s passion for winter sports and creates a training facility for future Olympians.  The manufacturing of winter clothes and sports gear would make for convenient testing grounds alongside these training facilities.