Press Releases June 27, 2024

Winners of Perkins&Will’s 2024 Phil Freelon Design Competition Imagine the Civic Library of 2049

• In its 20th year, Perkins&Will’s internal design ideas competition challenged teams to anticipate the socio-cultural changes that lie ahead and re-imagine how civic spaces might transform, using the San Francisco public library as a lens.
• Project teams proposed a variety of futuristic design solutions that address important issues such as civic connection, adaptive and renewable thinking, emerging technologies, and information access.

SAN FRANCISCO—A collaborative terrace where the public experiments with the latest in multi-media technology. A farmer’s market in the shadow of a vertical urban farm that harvests rainwater to grow food. A meditative sanctuary offering respite from AI-accelerated information overload. These are just some of the proposals put forth by the winners of the 2024 Phil Freelon Design Competition, Perkins&Will’s annual internal design ideas challenge that is now in its 20th year.

For this edition of the competition, participants were asked to re-imagine civic space through the lens of a library in the year 2049. Already, public libraries have had to adapt to the age of the internet and the changing habits of staff and visitors, transforming from passive collections of books to active zones for collaboration and creation. What other changes could we see in the next 25 years?

“For two decades, our next generation designers have grappled with an array of interesting issues facing our world, inventing new solutions to longstanding problems or anticipating challenges as yet unfaced,” says Chief Design Officer Casey Jones. “It’s one of the hallmarks of our firm’s design culture, which is rooted in curiosity, research, innovation, and purpose.”

The selected site for this year’s challenge is the main public library of San Francisco, which was built in 1996 and sits adjacent to City Hall. An external jury reviewed the design teams’ submissions and selected first, second, and third place winners along with three honorable mentions.

first place

Nest

Designed by Max Hu and August Miller

The winning concept imagines a new space in a near-future world where humans and artificial intelligence have established a mutualistic, long-term creative partnership. Dubbed Nest, the annex includes a collaborative terrace, virtual reality experience space, and studios for film, photography, art, and music.

“It is an honor to win the Phil Freelon Competition—there was such a wide range of excellent concepts from designers across the firm that we were very pleasantly surprised to receive first place,” says Miller. “The competition is an opportunity to just run with an idea and see where it goes – it’s a four-day sprint where we were able to compress our process from a simple sketch to a concept.”

Architecturally, the new building is defined by a unifying timber roof and hanging canopy with catwalks linking together workspaces. Beyond being a natural extension of the existing library, Nest is an idea incubator, designed to host sophisticated tools like artificial intelligence that will be used by citizens to create solutions of the future.

“I felt like I could understand what it would be like to relate to this building as a citizen,” said juror Michael Peter Edson, chief museum officer and director of the Museum of Solutions in Mumbai, India. “I think it reflects what Phil Freelon stood for and encouraged—to have a more human-scaled relationship with the built environment.”

second place

Unbound Plazas

Designed by Alay Thakrar, Dhruv Vairagi, Harshika Seth, and Ravi Chandar

Where Nest seeks to address the spatial and functional limitations of the existing public library, Unbound Plazas proposes to extend the nearby Civic Center Plaza, becoming its own landscape for socialization and connection. Organic layers of the building spill into the plaza, featuring amenities such as a farmer’s market, media repository, and incubator spaces. The main tower and knowledge hub feature a distinct multi-floored terrarium for rainwater harvesting and urban farming.

“This is a living building that created an ecosystem. I like the idea of layering the landscape and finding public space with nature,” said juror Rozana Montiel, founder of Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura in Mexico City.

Spaces in the library are reserved for activities like meditation, group cooking, and recreation. To address what the team sees as an emerging pattern of human disconnection and social isolation, they propose that the use of technology be banned from certain spaces altogether. Unbound Plazas suggests a new kind of civic space, one blended with a traditional park space, where human connections can be rebuilt.

third place

For The Makers of Memory

Designed by Adam Liu and Stephen Marinelli

This team sought to address a future “Library of Babel,” where the acceleration of artificial intelligence has created an overwhelming amount of information and digital content. In an increasingly hectic world, their proposal aims to slow down the ever-quickening pace of life through self-reflection and to elevate a human behavior that is universal.

Inspired by the golden record aboard the 1977 Voyager craft, which serves as a time capsule of humanity at-large, the library features an extensive archival system below the Earth’s surface. San Francisco’s residents carry a “record” with them, recording their experiences for upload to the library.

Honorable Mentions

Three proposals earned honorable mentions, or citations:

Libraries in Motion, designed by Liona Avery, Sarah Fleming, Yasmeen Barakat, and Nick Mason, taps into the city’s iconic network of cable cars, expanding the footprint of the library across the entire city with portable spaces. Decentralized Horizons, designed by Neal Li, Abubakr Bajaman, and Chung Fai Lam, establishes a municipal grid system of permanent, adaptable, and on-demand libraries, each half a mile apart, that host their own unique amenities. All! A Living Library, designed by Josh Fisher, Galen Carlson, Aayushi Mody, and Kishore Kandasamy, adapts the existing building in San Francisco’s plaza, transforming it into a new social destination that serves as a place for connection and creative inspiration.

Twenty Years of Design Excellence

At its most basic level, the Phil Freelon Design Competition is a friendly firmwide contest that fuels creativity and collaboration. More importantly, though, it’s a critical part of Perkins&Will’s culture of innovation and design excellence. Now in its second decade, the internal design competition provides the chance for colleagues across Perkins&Will and the Sidara Collaborative—a global network of leading designers, engineers, planners, and consultants–to connect beyond their region and practice. United toward a common purpose, these multidisciplinary teams innovate design solutions to some of society’s most pressing problems.

The jury reviewed submissions based on how well each team’s design supported their thesis, the strength of the design concept, the clarity and professionalism of the submissions, and how well each project fit within Perkins&Will’s Living Design framework. This year’s jury included Lisa Iwamoto, Founder, IwamotoScott Architecture; Rozana Montiel, Founder & Director, Rozana Montiel Estudio de Arquitectura; Michael Peter Edson, Chief Museum Officer & Director, Museum of Solutions; Gene Tam, Chief Librarian & Chief Innovation Officer, National Library Board Singapore; Dong Gong, Founder, Vector Architects; and Mario Gooden, Director, Mario Gooden Studio.

The competition is named in honor of late Perkins&Will principal Phil Freelon. Phil was a lifelong champion of beautiful, democratic design—of architecture that honors humanity. Over his 42-year-long career, Phil broke down socioeconomic and cultural barriers by designing places that express the spirit of community, promote cultural equity, and spur positive social change. He stood for everything the annual design competition stands for. And every year, he was an active and enthusiastic reviewer of the competition’s entries. Today, the Phil Freelon Design Competition ensures that Phil’s influence in the work and culture of Perkins&Will lives on.

“I want to congratulate the design competition participants for their visionary entries,” said Michael Lambert, city librarian, San Francisco Public Library. “As we embark on implementing our new vision and mission, these bold ideas provided additional inspiration and motivation for operationalizing our new strategic direction.”

Winners of Perkins&Will’s 2024 Phil Freelon Design Competition Imagine the Civic Library of 2049

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