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The Long Island Index Chooses Four Architectural Firms to Re-Think the Design of Parking Facilities in Four Long Island Communities

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THE LONG ISLAND INDEX CHOOSES FOUR ARCHITECTURAL FIRMS TO RE-THINK THE DESIGN OF PARKING FACILITIES IN FOUR LONG ISLAND COMMUNITIES

The Firms, Selected through a National Search, Will Propose Innovative Designs for Patchogue, Rockville Centre, Ronkonkoma, and Westbury – To Spark A Broader Discussion

Garden City, NY – September 18, 2013 – The Long Island Index, a project of the Rauch Foundation, today announced the selected architectural firms of its Build a Better Burb: ParkingPLUS Design Challenge, a key component of the Index’s 2014 focus on parking facility design innovations that would enhance downtown areas on Long Island and beyond. The Challenge will reveal new concepts of parking design that incorporate needed local amenities and make parking facilities an architectural attraction for downtown areas. The four firms will each address specific downtown needs in one of four Long Island communities – Patchogue, Rockville Centre, Ronkonkoma, and Westbury. Each of those communities is volunteering staff time and information and will be collaborating with the architectural firms to clarify their needs and identify potential sites for a design intervention.

“Our national search produced some of the most creative firms in the nation for this challenge,” said Nancy Rauch Douzinas, President of the Rauch Foundation. “We hope that the designs that emerge will both project the transformative potential of the specific sites in these communities and inspire a broader discussion on Long Island of the inventively positive presence that parking facilities could provide.”

The four winning design teams will each receive a stipend to prepare designs that will be unveiled by the Long Island Index in January. The firms, their office locations, and the communities with which they will be paired, are as follows:

The ParkingPLUS Design Challenge and the selection process is being coordinated by consultants June Williamson, Associate Professor of Architecture at The City College of New York/CUNY, author of Designing Suburban Futures and co-author of Retrofitting Suburbia, and Kaja Kühl, Adjunct Associate Professor of Urban Design at Columbia University and principal of youarethecity.

Each team will have six weeks to complete designs specific to their assigned location. After six weeks, design work will be submitted for review in preparation for its unveiling in January by the Long Island Index. The kickoff meetings between each design firm and community officials will take place on Friday, September 20.

“There are more than 4,000 acres of surface parking lots in and around Long Island’s downtowns, so the opportunity to re-think parking on Long Island is enormous,” said Ann Golob, Director of the Long Island Index. “Imagine how we could better use that space! That’s what these four firms will be doing in order to engage Long Islanders in re-thinking the parking potential of our downtown areas.”

Building on the successes of the 2010 Build a Better Burb open ideas competition (http://buildabetterburb.org), the ParkingPLUS Design Challenge will promote new thinking about Long Island’s mass transit-served downtowns. Build a Better Burb, the online journal of suburban design published by the Long Island Index, will be the focal point of the public discussion of the designs.

About the Rauch Foundation
The Rauch Foundation (www.rauchfoundation.org), which funds the Long Island Index, is a Long Island-based family foundation that invests in ideas and organizations that spark and sustain early success in children and systemic change in our communities. The Foundation was established in 1961 by Louis Rauch and Philip Rauch, Jr. Funding for the Foundation was made possible by the success of the Ideal Corporation, an auto parts manufacturer founded in 1913 by their father, Philip Rauch, Sr.

In addition to funding the Long Island Index for ten years, the Rauch Foundation commissioned The Long Island Profile Report and a series of polls on Long Island to determine how the region is faring. The Long Island Index reports are available for download at www.longislandindex.org. The Long Island Index interactive maps, an online resource with detailed demographic, residential, transportation and educational information, as well as the Build a Better Burb website, are also accessible from the Index’s website.

About the Architectural Firms

dub studios is an architecture and urban design firm with offices in Los Angeles and New York. At dub we create realist design inventions that transform existing conditions. Our work has been featured in the New York Times, Metropolis Magazine and the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam and was one of the winners of the first Build a Better Burb competition. We have a range of specialties for the ParkingPlus challenge: to visualize complex issues through clear illustrations, to engage software design that assists in city management (we currently have a patent pending for a shared parking system), to analyze and map metro regions, and to design mixed use high density projects with a passion for creating beauty through economy.

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects) is an architecture firm founded in 1997 by Paul Lewis, Marc Tsurumaki and David J. Lewis, located in New York City. LTL Architects engages a diverse range of design-intensive work, from large-scale academic and cultural buildings to interiors and speculative research projects, including a long interest in exploring concepts for “new suburbanism.” LTL Architects realizes inventive solutions that turn the very constraints of each project into the design trajectory, exploring opportunistic overlaps between space, program, form, budget and materials. LTL received a 2007 National Design Award, multiple AIA design awards and has been extensively published. LTL was featured in the U.S. Pavilion at the 2004 Venice Architecture Biennale and their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design (RSAUD) has been based in Los Angeles since 1990, and the firm’s work has been featured on CNN and The History Channel, and in Newsweek, Fast Company, the New York Times, and numerous design publications. Focused largely on work in the urban arena that negotiates the relationship between public and private investment, RSAUD’s acclaimed projects include Playa Rosa, a public/private mixed-use community-centered development in South LA, exhibited at the 2010 Venice Biennale (Italy) and Thinking Out of the Big Box, a development strategy for Target, featured at the 2009 Int’l Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, NL. The firm’s projects also include Hypo-Park, a high-density recreation structure, and the design of a new port city in the Ecuadorian Amazon. For ParkingPLUS, RSAUD has assembled future-oriented experts from the disciplines of urban economics, social space networks, and mobility trends and technology.

Utile, Inc. is a planning and architecture firm that specializes in the unique regulatory, political, and design challenges of complex urban projects. From theoretical issues that frame policy to the practical implementation of architectural commissions, Utile develops a rigorous research-based approach for finding the best solutions. The firm’s work is not driven by aesthetics, but by a shared interest in doing deep-dive research focused on the cultural, social, regulatory, and environmental issues inherent in a given design problem. Utile finds opportunities for design innovation by uncovering these latent issues and fully leveraging and synthesizing them. As a result, Utile doesn’t focus on a particular project type, but rather projects that require comprehensive research and collaborative engagement with their clients. The ParkingPLUS team will be headed by Utile, Inc. principal Tim Love.