First Prize
Re-Envisioning Lives
New York / New York / USA / Menghan Yu / Xinyi Zhang / Yangyi Li / University of Pennsylvania
1730
Would you want to live under the looming shadow of a 40-story JAILSCRAPER? The residents of Chinatown, New York, say no. The city’s fixation on colossal jail towers threatens to erode the neighborhood’s culture, strip away its vibrant street life, and, most critically, manifest a blatant disregard for and discrimination against a vulnerable community.
In this story, we invite you to join us in challenging the urban jail model and re-imagining a jail-integrated landscape where all urban residents—human and non-human—can coexist and thrive.
Jury Statement: This provocative and ambitious project reimagines the correctional facility not as a “jailscraper” looming over Chinatown, but as an urban living room—integrated, reparative, and ecologically responsive. Through distributed, smaller-scale interventions and an emphasis on transparency, access, and biodiversity, the proposal dismantles the architecture of intimidation in favor of a typology rooted in care and coexistence. At the urban scale, the project returns public space to the community, creating generous, flexible grounds for shared civic life and local expression. This is a radical inversion of carceral logic—one that proposes landscape not as boundary, but as bridge. The jury reckognizes the team’s courage to imagine a radically different jail situation and the interactive landscape that enables it.