The
Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) has announced the winner of a recent design competition,
Uncover the Green, in which university-level art students were challenged to develop a decorative medallion to appear near the city's green infrastructure projects.
Tyler School of Art student Lauren Hoover came out on top.
The students were also tasked with designing a new manhole cover for the city. As with the medallions -- which will be inset into city sidewalks -- PWD hopes the eye-catching manhole covers will spotlight green infrastructure projects.
The competition was developed as a visibility effort for PWD's
Green City, Clean Waters plan, a $2.4 billion initiative to manage the area's watershed and control its sewer overflow for the next 25 years.
Accoding to PWD's Tiffany Ledesma Groll, "no other city is investing in green infrastructure in the way that Philadelphia is."
"We want to make sure the city's investments in green infrastructure are visible, because our stormwater trees look like regular trees, and our rain gardens -- they look like gardens," she explains. "We needed to figure out a way to make them stand out."
The city hopes to have the medallions fabricated and in the ground within a year -- they may eventually appear next to every green infrastructure project in the city, according to Groll. (Currently,
756 such projects have been completed or are in-progress.) Due to cost restrictions, it's unclear when the newly-designed manhole covers will be produced.
Writer: Dan Eldridge
Source: Tiffany Ledesma Groll, Philadelphia Water Department