Mojdeh Baratloo Urban Urge Awards
A group of friends, family, students and colleagues of Mojdeh Baratloo are honoring her life, work and commitment to ideas, cities, communities, and her students by creating a memorial urban projects grant program.
Leader
Justin Moore
Location
1172 Amsterdam Ave New York, NY 10027
About the project
The Urban Urge Awards honor the legacy of architect, educator, community advocate and urban designer Mojdeh (Moji) Baratloo (1954-2013). Moji was born in Iran, educated in the United States, and practiced and taught in New York City and all over the globe. As an Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Parsons the New School for Design for over 20 years, she helped to shape the Architecture and Urban Design Programs that have influenced generations of architects, designers and urbanists. She also taught at her alma mater, the University of Michigan, and other institutions in the United States and abroad. Her professional, community and academic work made significant and critical contributions to the field of urban design and to the development of cities globally.
The Steps
1. We will raise our project funds using ioby.org (our fiscal sponsor) to fund the Awards program. Our target budget is based on providing for 10 small project grants that will be used to develop and build physical and/or programmatic interventions in the awardees' own (urban) communities.
2. Once the funds have been secured we will finalize the program schedule and budget, to be announced at a formal memorial program in November 2013. The website and ioby.org page will launch at this point, including competition requirements, deadlines.
3. The Awards program organizers will assemble entries to be judged by an inter-disciplinary jury, winning projects will be awarded the funds and begin their work.
4. After a period (tbd) all awarded grants will have completed their physical/programmatic interventions and document them for presentation/exhibition.
5. The Urban Urge Awards will host a final 'pecha kucha' event where the awardees will present their completed projects in a public forum and to have an interdisciplinary, inter-generational, and cross-community dialogue around the role, impact, and future of urban design.
Why we‘re doing it
Moji believed in both the importance of ideas and the practice of making one’s work real, “for the experience of a human or environment.” She challenged and urged her students, colleagues and collaborators, friends and foes to have the conversations across disciplinary or social boundaries and to make our cities, regions and world more livable, sustainable, enjoyable and responsible. She once stated simply, “Once people know how important their environment is, they can make it better."