WSU-Spokane team wins design contest

Four Washington State University students from the Spokane campus beat out professional architects from around the country in a national design competition.

The Walla Walla Market Station Design Competition, which started in April, attracted professionals and student architects to compete for the winning design of the downtown farmer’s market and bus station.

Sixteen anonymous entries were received for the competition, of those entries, seven were invited to resubmit their designs after the first phase of the competition. Three teams, including the Spokane team headed by Blake Bural, resubmitted their revised design schemes for the second round of the competition.

After the final results were announced on July 19, the team was awarded $3,000 in addition to the $5,000 they won for making it to the semi-finals which Bural said they split evenly.

“None of us went into it thinking we would flat-out win it,” said Bural.

The group of students including Nicholas Carpenter, Colin Anderson and Ben Fields are enrolled in the Master’s of Architecture program at WSU-Spokane. Bural said they decided to enter the competition for the experience.

By the time the group registered, they had only a few weeks to submit their design.

Bural said they traveled to Walla Walla and spent a day there in order to get a feel for how the community functions in the area they would redesign.

The rest of the time they worked on the project was done meeting at least once a week and via e-mail because of their full-time work schedules.

Part of the competition required designers to take into consideration pedestrian access, bus routes, parking, weather, utilization of both the farmer’s market and a firefighter’s memorial in Crawford Park.

“We paid attention to what the competition wanted,” Bural said. “Instead of doing something contemporary, we stuck with Walla Walla and kept that kind of older feeling.”

Matt Cohen, assistant professor of architecture at WSU in Spokane, taught the students during their undergraduate studies.

“This is every teacher’s dream,” Cohen said.

Cohen also said design competitions like this open up opportunities for younger unknown talent like this group of students.

Although competition officials said the winning design may be implemented in the future, there is not a specific time frame for doing so.

“There’s no designated funding for construction, it’s possible in the future, but when is not certain,” said Gary Mabley, senior planner with the city of Walla Walla.

There will likely be a final design including parts of other projects that were submitted which would then be presented to the city, said Mabley.

This is exactly what Paul Hirzel, one of the jurors for the competition, is afraid of.

“I’m hoping as this thing evolves that its attributes like its strong urban edge are not diluted,” Hirzel said.

The other submissions didn’t respond to the context in the way their project did, Hirzel said.