Freed: Design Winner Will Build Actual City Block
Chris Cheatham (Green Building Law Update) interviewed Eric Corey Freed last week and just posted the first in a 2-part series interview:
My friends over at Sensible City recently offered me the opportunity to interview Eric Corey Freed. It’s not everyday I get to interview someone who was just interviewed by the New York Times so I jumped at the chance. Even better, Eric is an “organic architect” and studied under a former student of Frank Lloyd Wright. I am getting married in October at Wright’s Arizona home, Taliesin West, so I couldn’t pass up this opportunity.
Eric is involved in a tremendous design competition called Urban Re:Vision, and he describes how Dallas was chosen as the site for the competition: “The mayor, Tom Leppert, was fantastic. He’s got 30 years in the building industry and he understood Urban Re:Vision right off the bat. So the City of Dallas gave us this block next door to city hall and said ‘Here, this would be perfect,’ and everything kind of came together. Now we have what we always wanted, a real city block, with real stakeholders behind it and the winning entry will really get built.”
In Part I of the interview, Eric and I discuss “organic architecture” and the Urban Re:Vision competition in some detail. Eric also provdies insight into liability concerns surrounding the competition. On Wednesday, we will discuss broader legal issues surrounding the green building indusry and a controversy that arose over Eric’s New York Times interview.
