A team of five graduate students from this university took first place in the Urban Land Institute’s 2014 Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition on Saturday, winning $50,000 in prize money. 

The competition, which ended this weekend in Nashville, Tenn., tasked 163 teams from 72 universities with creating an urban design and development plan for a real-life, large-scale site. This year’s location was Nashville neighborhood Sulphur Dell, an underused area that was once home to the nation’s oldest baseball stadium. Competitors had two weeks to develop a creative but economically feasible plan that encourages healthy living while addressing issues such as flood resilience. 

“All the teams that entered had to solve the same problem,” said Matthew Bell, a university architecture professor and one of the winning team’s two advisers. “Everyone had requirements and considerations they had to address. What set us apart is we had a super design, a great business plan and an excellent presentation.” 

The team’s members went through a highly competitive application process, Bell said. Andrew Casavant, David Ensor, Matthew Miller, Amina Mohamed and Rameez Munawar, all pursuing master’s degrees at this university, were selected for the team. Munawar is the only team member studying real estate development — a subject, he said, that combines his two passions for architecture and business. 

“I was in the architecture school as an undergrad, but when I graduated I found I didn’t really enjoy the 18-hour workdays, being stuck at my desk,” Munawar said. “I’d always had an interest in business and finance, but I didn’t find that super exciting either. So I sort of combined the two.” 

This university has sent teams to the competition finals three times in the past five years, but this is its first victory. Beating out finalists from Harvard University, the University of Texas at Austin and Georgia Institute of Technology was “fantastic,” said Architecture Dean David Conrath. 

An international jury of experts in urban design, landscape architecture and planning and development, among other fields, selected the winning proposal, “Chords.” The plan connected Sulphur Dell’s diverse community that houses a variety of amenities such as green spaces, housing, a farmers market and bike paths through connectors called “strings.” 

“Our concept was much more appropriate to the situation given than the other teams,’” Munawar said. “It wasn’t something you could copy and paste in another city and have it still work. It was really rooted in the culture of Nashville; we were able to capture the spirit of the city — the music, the baseball.” 

The team conducted an extensive amount of market research to design a plan unique to Nashville, Munawar said. This enabled the students to construct a comprehensive financial strategy, which allowed the plan to survive year by year. 

Munawar said he could not have contributed to this design without the education he received from this university’s real estate program.

“A year and a half ago, I didn’t know the first thing about finance,” Munawar said. “I didn’t even know what an interest rate was. The fact that I went, in a year and a half, from not knowing anything to winning a competition this prestigious says a lot about how good the program is.”