It came down to the wire last Friday night as the full-house audience at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral watched the real-time results of the text-to-vote poll on the big screen, but one team emerged victorious: by the time MC Ilya Marritz called it, the Underline prevailed over the East River Skyway by a single vote.
Pitching the City 2015 at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. Photo by Daniel Levin.
Of course, all five of the finalists put forth their best effort at “pitching the city” or presenting their big urban idea in the second edition of this signature event, part of the New Museum’s biennial IDEAS CITY Festival. Brought to you by Architizer and the Municipal Art Society (MAS), the dynamic live-pitch event invited five “pitchers” to take to the stage and present their proposals for improving contemporary cities (+POOL won the first time around, in 2013) in front of a panel of four esteemed judges: Majora Carter (Startup Box), Shohei Shigematsu (OMA), Scott Anderson (Control Group), and Michelle Mullineaux (Blue State Digital). Free and open to the public, Pitching the City culminated with a public vote in which the audience was invited to consider both the concepts themselves and the judges’ feedback to determine a winner.
© Nikolas Koenig
The Underline’s Meg Daly and Hamish Smith (holding microphone) at right, pitching to the judges (from left): Scott Anderson, Michelle Mullineaux, Shohei Shigematsu, and Majora Carter. Photo by Daniel Levin.
In addition to the East River Skyway — a proposal to build an aerial cable car between Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan — the diverse group of finalists included: Open Lobby, an initiative to reactivate dormant street-level office space in East Midtown; the Docklands Surf Park, a plan to tap into the recreational opportunities on the Melbourne waterfront; and the NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative, an organization spearheading the collective ownership of commercial real estate.
As for the winner, we’ve had our eye on the Miami Underline since they announced that James Corner Field Operations — a multiple-time A+Award winner for the High Line, among other projects — as the landscape architect for the 10-mile linear park.
At top and above: renderings of the Miami Underline.
But in the end, it was the public that determined the winner in a nail-biting public poll. Thanks again to everyone who attended the event, the five finalists and four judges, and of course our friends at MAS and the New Museum. We couldn’t have done it without you!