THE ATELIER
The Beaux-Arts Atelier seeks to offer an apprenticeship program in which participants work alongside senior advisors to design major public projects and present them.
The goal is to offer design competitions which review the design proposals of young talented designers for specific projects. A jury will select a winning design, and the young designer(s) will be given the opportunity to develop their design alongside senior advisors, thus creating a type of apprenticeship training opportunity.
The BAA will support the design development, renderings and other visuals, and advocacy of these designs in the public realm with the goal of influencing and enhancing both public awareness and discourse as to the beautiful design possibilities that can be realized for any given project.
DESIGN COMPETITION IN THE WORKS: New York’s Tunnel Workers—The Sandhogs
“Drill, blast, shovel. Drill, blast, shovel. Repeat…”
Our first competition is going to focus on a design concept for a monument to New York’s Tunnel Workers, also known as Sandhogs. Their work, so invisible to the public, is laborious, dangerous, and foundational to our entire transit system. In fact, Alexander Cassatt was so keenly aware of the dangers and obstacles they had to overcome to enable the original Penn Station that it was part of what inspired him to build a Station worthy of their efforts. We seek to do the same, and this time to incorporate into our very design for Penn Station a monument memorializing their labors. It is fitting that a space designed to be lofty, inspiring and uplifting should also hold a space honoring the invisible, dangerous, gritty and essential work necessary to make it all happen.
Our plan is to open up to submissions for a monument concept from young designers, create a panel to review them, and select a winning concept which we will then advocate for alongside our Penn Station project. The winning design concept team will receive a stipend of $10,000 to work along side our architectural/design team to further develop their concept into a plan, as the plans for Penn Station also evolve.
Can you help support this new initative? Please donate now! And learn more about the Sandhogs here.
From Our Archives
Photos here from BAA Design Studio from 2011-2013
Project exercise for the redesign of Federal Hall in Manhattan. Designs were presented to the public at the Institute for Classical Architecture & Art.
Excerpt from film Full Circle by Steve McCurdy