2024 Research Prize
Soft-Urban Riverfront: A New Paradigm for Headwater Metropolises

Pig’s Eye Lake at the Mississippi River in St. Paul, a site of historical pollution with significant Indigenous heritage and ecological importance, will serve as a catalyst project of the “Soft-Urban Riverfront: A New Paradigm for Headwater Metropolises” studio. Through a cross-disciplinary and cross-scalar approach, the studio will work with ecologists, scientists, historians, policymakers, and community stakeholders to create design strategies that enhance biodiversity, public health, and cultural awareness.

Dingliang Yang
Jennifer Yoos
Maura Rockcastle
Ross Altheimer
Roger Cummings
Daniel Carlson
Changó Cummings
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

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Mapping of the “Soft-Urban Riverfront” along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities, highlighting Pig’s Eye as a crucial site with a history of pollution, rich Indigenous heritage, and ecological significance. © Dingliang Yang and Michael Keller.

Jury
Carson Chan
Carol Coletta
Iker Gil (Chair)
Alex Krieger
Shannon Nichol

This proposed research-oriented urban design studio will tackle the “Headwater Challenge” by examining the unique responsibility of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) as the first major metropolitan area downstream from the Mississippi River’s headwaters. The studio will address critical issues along the Mississippi—historical waste disposal, industrial pollution, and climate-induced threats to water quality—that endanger ecosystems and communities downstream if left unaddressed.

Building on the lead faculties’ previous work on conceptualizing the Mississippi in the Twin Cities as an urbanistic driver, the studio aims to reconceptualize the Mississippi River as a cohesive “Urban Spine” for the Twin Cities, integrating sustainable development, cultural spaces, ecological restoration, and natural habitats into urban life. Central to this vision is the concept of “Soft-Urban Riverfront,” a nature-oriented urban river paradigm that is more suitable for a headwater metropolis, contrasting with the development-intensive waterfronts typical of endwater metropolises.

Pig’s Eye Lake at the Mississippi River in St. Paul, a site of historical pollution with significant Indigenous heritage and ecological importance, will serve as a catalyst project of the studio. Through a cross-disciplinary and cross-scalar approach, the studio will work with ecologists, scientists, historians, policymakers, and community stakeholders to create design strategies that enhance biodiversity, public health, and cultural awareness. These strategies hold the potential to redefine the Twin Cities’ relationship with the Mississippi, fostering resilience for this essential North American river system and the communities it supports.

The map of the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities in 1903, illustrating the potential of the Mississippi as the spine of the Twin Cities. This map was created by Dingliang Yang via combining Plates 135, 136, and 137 from the Map of the Upper Mississippi River: From the Mouth of the Ohio River to Lake Itasca, Minnesota, surveyed by the Mississippi River Commission. © University of Minnesota’s Borchert Map Library.

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A photo of 1969, taken by a member of the environmental advocacy group Minnesota Environmental Control Citizens Association (MECCA), depicts a variety of waste dumped in the Pig’s Eye Lake at the Mississippi River, with Downtown St Paul in the background. The approximately 8.3 million cubic yards of buried waste garbage and hazardous materials remains buried under layers of soil and water in Pig’s Eye today. © Minnesota Environmental Control Citizens Association and Minnesota Historical Society.

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Aerial view of the Mississippi River and Pig’s Eye Lake, a microcosm of challenges for a Headwaters Metropolis, where diverse and often conflicting uses co-exist. This area includes the region’s largest heron and egret rookery, an active port terminal, industrial facilities, a park, the Dakota homeland with layered histories, a decommissioned wastewater treatment center next to a 170-acre active treatment facility, a wood recycling center, BNSF railroad tracks, and the Pig’s Eye Waste Dump Landfill overlaid on Battle Creek, and newly constructed artificial islands. © Widseth.

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  • Key Question: How can architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design contribute to better addressing environmental challenges as a metropolitan issue along the Mississippi River in the Twin Cities?
  • Objective: This project conducts design research on the Mississippi River, focusing on the Twin Cities as the river’s headwater metropolis. The goal is to develop design solutions that reimagine the Mississippi as a central spine that enhances biodiversity, public health, and cultural awareness. By using the Pig’s Eye site as a catalyst, the project aims to create lasting impacts for both the Twin Cities and the broader Mississippi watershed.

Watercolor drawing illustrating the Mississippi River with key focal points. © Maura Rockcastle.

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“Soft-Urban Riverfront” stood out amongst other proposals in its multi-scalar approach to architecture and landscape design. Working on a particular site near the Mississippi River’s headwaters, students are also asked to analyze the larger watershed and metropolitan context of the site. That the proposal also acknowledged the Dakota Nation’s primacy in this area made clear that the project leads understand that any ecological design research is a continuation of the environmental knowledge gained by those who have lived on this land for far longer than settler colonists and immigrants.
Carson Chan, 2024 Research Prize Juror

  • Format: The research will be carried out primarily through a vertical urban studio at the University of Minnesota during the Fall 2025 semester, engaging senior undergraduate students in the BS Architecture program alongside final-year MArch and MLA students. Additionally, research will be conducted with RAs during the summer (for preparation) and winter (for synthesis).
  • Process: Inspired by Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic “Powers of Ten,” the studio will adopt a cross-scalar approach to both research and design. This approach will integrate interdisciplinary perspectives from the humanities, ecology, and chemistry, addressing issues like waste dumping and industrial pollution along the Mississippi. Design solutions will extend across scales, ultimately contributing to the reconfiguration of the Mississippi River as a “Soft-Urban Riverfront.” The project involves two phases of cross-scalar research and design: Zoom-in and Zoom-out.

Zoom-in

The studio will start with multi-scalar and comparative mapping studies. Students will analyze spatial, ecological, and socio-cultural roles of seven major rivers while centering the Mississippi—Amazon, Yangtze, Nile, Danube, Rhine, and Meikong—across the five following scales:

  1. Continental Scale: Understanding each river’s role within ecological and economic systems.
  2. Regional Scale: Identifying geographical conditions and connections to surrounding landscapes and ecosystems.
  3. Metropolitan Scale: Studying how urbanized areas interact with riverfronts, comparing development, resilience, and pollution management strategies.
  4. Urban Scale: Analyzing city-river interactions, existing green and social infrastructure, and challenges like flooding and pollution. This analysis will allow students to identify unique and common planning and design paradigms, gaining insights into how the Twin Cities’ riverfront shares characteristics with, or diverges from, other river-metropolises worldwide.
  5. Site Scale: The study will then zoom in to the Pig’s Eye Lake site, the 1,000-acre East Side River District, which includes a historic waste dump, an indigenous cultural site, a heron sanctuary, railyards, active port terminals, a wastewater treatment plant, and extensive water bodies. This site encapsulates a range of social, physical, and environmental challenges, serving as a catalyst for design solutions.

Zoom-out:

Based on site analysis findings, students will move into a phase of integrating technical and scientific exploration into their design strategies. This phase will involve interdisciplinary collaborations with University of Minnesota professors to address key challenges.

Firstly, Students will design and develop prototypes addressing environmental issues while integrating artistic and cultural responses to social concerns. For example, inspired by artist Mel Chin’s Revival Field (1991), which used plants to absorb heavy metals, students will explore bio-remediation techniques for Pig’s Eye Lake. While individual students may focus on specific aspects, the studio as a whole will generate a range of solutions for the Mississippi River corridor. In collaboration with the Great River Passage Conservancy and the City of St. Paul, some prototypes may be installed on Pig’s Eye Lake, transforming it into a “Living Laboratory” for the Soft-Urban Riverfront concept. Following this, students will explore how these strategies could be scaled along the Mississippi River to address sites with similar conditions, including toxic areas like Ford Area C and the Exxon Mobil oil tank farm. Students will develop adaptable toolkits that can be applied across urban and metropolitan scales, contributing to a tangible vision for a Soft-Urban Riverfront along the Mississippi.

During the Zoom-out process, four different workshops for cross-disciplinary investigations are being proposed with University of Minnesota faculty and metropolitan and regional public partners concurrently working on overlapping studies that center on the remediation and reuse of Pig's Eye Lake:

  1. Site Scale: Led by Professors Lee Penn (Chemistry) and Joshua M. Feinberg (Earth and Environmental Sciences), who are researching biochar applications for pollution management and habitat restoration at Pig’s Eye Lake.
  2. Urban Scale Workshop: Guided by Professors Brenda Child (American Indian Studies) and Mae Davenport (Natural Resources), this workshop will incorporate Indigenous knowledge and explore culturally responsive design approaches.
  3. Urban Scale Community Workshop: Organized with the Great River Passage Conservancy to gather community perspectives on the river’s role and significance.
  4. Metropolitan Scale Workshop: In partnership with Professor Bonnie Keeler (Urban Policy), focusing on the economic and social impacts of water quality along the Mississippi, informing strategy selection for larger-scale applications.

This project emphasizes that sustainable urban design requires interdisciplinary expertise and creative, multi-scale thinking. By exploring how small-scale interventions can inspire large-scale transformations (and vice versa), the studio seeks to test a range of new approaches for Soft-Urban Riverfront interventions.

Watercolor drawing titled, “Taoyateduta’s village,” ca.1846–1848, by Seth Eastman, illustrating the Mississippi River at Kaposia and “Pig’s Eye,” where Dakota People resided. © Minnesota Historical Society.

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Thank you to the SOM Foundation for your support of our project that centers the urban river and its environmental challenges. We are honored to receive the SOM Foundation Research Prize to develop our work at the intersection of architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism, ecology, and cultural heritage. This award will help realize our ambition to investigate and potentially define “soft-urban” riverfront strategies—using the Twin Cities-Mississippi River as a case study—that balance urban life with environmental stewardship. Through this interdisciplinary and collaborative work, we hope to help meet the need for our headwater metropolis to confront historical pollution and spatial justice, industrial impacts, and climate-induced vulnerabilities, ultimately taking on its unique responsibility in safeguarding ecosystems and communities downstream.
Dingliang Yang and Jennifer Yoos

Somf 2024 research prize dingliang yang headshot

Dingliang Yang
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Somf 2024 research prize jennifer yoos headshot

Jennifer Yoos
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Somf 2024 research prize maura rockcastle headshot

Maura Rockcastle
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Somf 2024 research prize ross altheimer headshot

Ross Altheimer
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Somf 2024 research prize roger cummings headshot

Roger Cummings
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Somf 2024 research prize daniel carlson headshot

Daniel Carlson
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Somf 2024 research prize chango cummings headshot

Changó Cummings
University of Minnesota
The Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design (ALI)

Dingliang Yang

is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota College of Design and the founding partner of vari design. With a focus on cross-scale innovative design, his work is driven by research that responds to urban challenges, particularly in the contexts of city development and regeneration. His design and built projects have earned different awards and have been widely published in international media, as well as been showcased at exhibitions and various venues, including the Venice Biennale, Beijing Design Week, and Shanghai Urban Space Art Season. In 2018, he curated the inaugural Chongqing International Creative Week. He is the author of multiple books on urban form and city design, including the award-winning Urban Grids: Handbook for City Design (ORO Editions, 2019), co-authored with Joan Busquets and Michael Keller, and the forthcoming Expos as Great Urban Projects. Yang has been appointed to the board of the USA Minnesota Expo Bid Commission, which represents the US national bid for Expo 2027 and the Horticultural Expo in 2031. He holds a Doctor of Design (DDes) and a Master in Urban Design (MAUD) with distinction from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and a Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) from Zhejiang University.

Jennifer Yoos

is Professor and Head of the Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Minnesota College of Design (2020–Present), as well as a design partner (1997–Present) and president of VJAA. VJAA is known for its innovative approach to practice that prioritizes context, environment, social space, and building craft. Since its beginnings in 1995, the firm has received twenty-three national design awards, including six National AIA Honor Awards, six Progressive Architecture Awards, and two AIA/COD Top Ten Green Building Awards. VJAA is the recipient of the 2012 National American Institute of Architects Firm Award. Yoos received an MArch in Architecture and Urbanism from the Architectural Association in London, a professional BArch from the University of Minnesota, and a Loeb Fellowship in Urban and Environmental Studies at Harvard University. Prior to teaching at Minnesota as a Professor-in-Practice, she was the NADAA Visiting Professor at Cooper Union and the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She is co-author, with partner Vincent James, of a monograph on their work published by Princeton Architectural Press—VJAA: Vincent James Associates Architects—as well as their book Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis (2016).

Maura Rockcastle

is an HWS Cleveland Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota College of Design and a Principal + Cofounder of TEN x TEN where she leads large-scale projects that navigate complex and culturally sensitive processes. Her design and leadership approach are grounded in listening, experimentation, and empathy, allowing her to translate experiences into landscapes through spatializing stories. With a background in fine arts, she balances a rigorous approach to leadership, implementation, and design excellence with a process based conceptual sensibility. She holds a BFA in sculpture and printmaking from Cornell University and an MLA from the University of Pennsylvania, where she won the Ian L. McHarg Prize. Rockcastle’s experience focuses on cultural, institutional, and public realm projects. Recognized as a national leader of design process innovation, adaptive reuse, and culturally significant landscapes, her projects have received national awards for design excellence, sustainability, and preservation from the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Architectural League of New York, and the Urban Land Institute. She believes in a hands-on approach to design and practice allowing inclusive, open, and successful collaborations with clients and teams. She engages curiosity to explore new methods of seeing and understanding landscapes and people.

Ross Altheimer

is an HWS Cleveland Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota College of Design and a Principal + Cofounder of TEN x TEN where he works to build just communities and institutions by leveraging landscape’s dynamic capacity for change. His process explores the art, complexity, and temporality of place and culture. He facilitates strategy, visioning, planning, and implementation for cultural, community, and open-space projects across the nation. His joy is building and collaborating with teams of curious and joyful humans. Altheimer’s work is rooted in a transdisciplinary approach, and he holds both a Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia, where he was awarded the Nix Fellowship in subterranean Paris. His collaborations have earned national awards and recognition from the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the General Services Administration, and the Architecture League of New York. He was a recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship in Landscape Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. Altheimer is emphatic about creating space for the dreams of individuals, communities, and organizations in his process. He believes that transformative design emerges from deep ways of knowing, storytelling, and the authenticity of people and places.

Roger Cummings

is an Adjunct Associate Professor in Practice at the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota and the Chief Cultural Producer and cofounder of Juxtaposition Arts (JXTA) in Minneapolis, a visual art and cultural center dedicated to teaching diverse and under-represented youth creative careers. Founded in 1995, Cummings has grown JXTA from a $1,500 organization to completing a $14 million capital campaign, resulting in a new three-story building housing social enterprise labs, a ceramics lab, and a graffiti room, along with a renovated building serving as an archive and residency space. Cumming’s work is exhibited across public and private spaces in the US, including notable projects like the John Biggers Seed Project, Great River Landing, and Rondo Commemorative Plaza. His impactful social sculptures include the JXTA campus, the skate-able art plaza on Broadway and Emerson Ave, and the bubble cistern at Emerson and Broadway. He engages in various community projects, such as designing skate-able art plazas, creating social justice murals, collaborating on art designs with local youth, and reimagining redevelopment plans in economically depressed areas. He received a Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design (2009).

Daniel Carlson

is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Minnesota College of Design. With nearly ten years of professional experience working at internationally renowned offices in Germany, Mexico, and on both the East and West Coasts, Carlson cofounded Obermeyer Carlson Office (OCO) in 2021 with partner Andrew Obermeyer. The design and architecture studio, based between Los Angeles and Mexico City, is committed to pushing the pragmatic constraints of challenging sites and briefs to generate unexpected, enigmatic spaces and buildings. Previous and current projects include a new hyper-narrow duplex built in a compact rear yard in Echo Park, Los Angeles; a family home built into abandoned terraced farms in Madeira, Portugal; the rehabilitation of two historic towers on Reforma Avenue in Mexico City; exhibition design for the Iranian-American artist Tala Madani for her first American retrospective at the MOCA Geffen in Los Angeles; several large-scale hospitality projects along the Mexican Pacific Coast from Todos Santos to Puerto Escondido; and twin hillside houses on adjacent hillside plots in Mount Washington, Los Angeles, among other residential and commercial projects.

Changó Cummings

is an interdisciplinary architectural designer, artist, and educator who practices throughout North America and beyond. With a multifaceted career spanning more than a decade, Changó’s work weaves through the realms of art, design, placemaking, education, and regenerative community building. Changó’s hands-on design practice goes beyond blueprints and software, bridging the gap between theory and real-world impact. His practice is at the nexus of disciplines, recognizing the symbiotic relationship between artistry, education, and community engagement, with a focus on the Black/Indigenous Diaspora.