Three students in Professor Jefferson Ellinger's Graduate Topic Design Studio have taken the top prizes in the 2017 Living Building Challenge-Los Angeles (LBC-LA) Collaborative Student Competition. The international competition invited students to design Pavilion Zero, which is envisioned as the main pavilion for the Los Angeles World’s Fair, if the city hosts the fair in 2022. The challenge reads:
“Imagine a building designed and constructed to function as elegantly and efficiently as a flower; a building informed by its bioregion's characteristics, and that generates all of its own energy with renewable resources, captures and treats all of its water, and operates efficiently and for maximum beauty.”
The winning entries were:
1st Place ($1500), Déjà vu, by Alaa Bou Ghanem
2nd Place ($750), OPENing Air, by Jeremiah Blanco
3rd Place ($250), The Pipes, by Mahdi Ghavidel Sedehi