Idea Award
The largest annual grants of the Curry Stone Foundation are to the College of Design, School of Architecture of the University of Kentucky. One grant endows a University Chair, with Dean Emeritus, David Mohney, to fill the Chair. The second grant funds an ongoing annual prize of $100,000 plus a search and an educational program. The Curry Stone Design Prize is awarded an individual or group who, in response to a particular need in an area of: clean water, clean air, clean food, shelter, community health, and peace, have developed a specific design solution that has the potential to create beneficial change and vital community. Like the MacArthur Award, this prize is "no strings attached." The ongoing nomination process is anonymous, but the Jury composition is disclosed. The recipient of the award will be announced each September at the Louisville IdeaFestival. The 2008 prize finalists are Shawn Frayne, Wes Janz, MMA Architects, Marjetica Potrc, and Antonio Scarponi.
Shawn Frayne, 27, inventor of the Windbelt, the world’s first non–turbine wind–powered generator. The technology, which is light enough to hold in your hand, has enormous potential to help people in poor communities power lamps, run small vaccine refrigerators, and charge cell phones for pennies a day. Frayne was inspired to create the Windbelt after a visit to a village in Haiti where residents, who lack an electrical grid, rely on costly kerosene and diesel fuel.
Wes Janz, 55, architect and associate professor of architecture at Ball State University in Indiana, and author of the forthcoming book, One Small Project. Janz's practice focuses on &lq;leftover places&rq; — the world's slums and settlements where people build shelters from scavenged materials — as sites of innovation and inspiration for architects committed to using their craft for social good. In collaboration with his students and local communities, Janz has constructed shelters and pavilions in Argentina, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere, from found materials such as mud and rubble from demolished buildings.
MMA Architects, whose principals, Luyanda Mphahlwa, 49, and Mphethi Morojele, 45, are reshaping South Africa’s post–apartheid architectural landscape. MMA's innovations include an ingenious design for low–cost homes in a shantytown outside Cape Town, with timber frame and sandbag in–fill construction that can be built for $6,900. The design, which borrows from indigenous mud–and–wattle building techniques, is energy efficient and requires little to no electricity or skilled labor to construct. MMA will complete 10 such houses by the end of the year with volunteer help from local women in the community.
Marjetica Potrc, 55, an artist and architect who works closely with impoverished communities to devise sustainable solutions to quality–of–life dilemmas. A six-month stay in the barrios of Carcaras, Venezuela, resulted in her design for a "dry toilet," which collects human waste and converts it to fertilizer. More recently, she has spent time in New Orleans examining the revival of homegrown sustainable practices such as rainwater harvesting, which helps collect storm water runoff, restores wetlands and prevents flooding.
Antonio Scarponi, 34, an architect based in Venice, Italy, whose interdisciplinary projects use architecture, multimedia arts and design to "jam" conventional social orders and illuminate the social and political lines that unite and divide us. His 2007 interactive project, "Dreaming Wall," was a digitally generated billboard installed in an historic Milanese square that displayed randomly chosen real–time text messages sent from across the world.
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