Overview
The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art [SMoCA], Arizona, is organizing a design competition and public exhibition, Flip a Strip. This innovative project hopes to foster creative, yet pragmatic new visions for the renovation of the small-scale strip shopping plazas that line the streets of this metropolitan area—and virtually every suburban zone in the country. (Note: this is an idea-generating competition, not a design/build project.)

In oversupply yet vastly underused, such strip plazas (built a generation ago) define the streetscapes of many towns. Many are dilapidated eyesores. Yet many are home to small restaurants, sole proprietorships and mom-and-pop businesses that can be wonderfully unique, entrepreneurial concerns, highly responsive to community needs. Strip malls breed strange and wonderful bedfellows (a yoga studio next to pet grooming next to a mattress store, for example), yet are plagued by interspersed vacant storefronts and the most generic of designs.

Ringed by parking and adjacent to thriving neighborhoods, these strip malls have great potential for adaptive re-use and architectural upgrades. They are typically an undervalued and neglected building stock. This competition will look at options for making strip malls economically viable, aesthetically interesting and communally meaningful.

The award-winning submissions and approximately seven additional entries will be selected for fuller development and presentation in an exhibition at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art from October 2008 – January 2009, for which participants will receive a modest materials stipend. All other submissions, as feasible, will be compiled and shown in a running projection in the exhibition.

Flip a Strip continues SMoCA’s commitment to creating a forum for public issues of both local and national importance and to fostering ideas that better the quality of civic life.

Community Advisory Committee
David Allen, Trevor Barger, David Barnett, Geoff Beer, George Bosworth, Chris Camberlango, Mike Ebert, Nan Ellin, Greg Esser, Jerry Foster, David Lacy, Scott Lyon, Mike Medici, Bill Nassikas, Scott O'Connor, Brian Polachek, Amy Silverman, Steve Steinberg, David Tyda, Charles Walker and Cyd West.

About the Competition
The competition is a hybrid, both open and invitational, with a nominal registration fee of $60.

Participants must be professional architects with at least five years professional experience. Teams of architects and developers may submit.

Participants can select one of three model sites (which have been submitted by city planners from the municipalities of Scottsdale, Tempe and Phoenix, Arizona) for their design proposal.

Submissions will first be reviewed by a Technical Jury of area experts and advisors, who will send its scoring on to the Design Jury.

The Design Jury will award three monetary prizes of $8,000; $4,000 and $2,000.

Ineligibility/conflicts of interest
Ineligible to participate in this competition are: employees and board members of the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Scottsdale Cultural Council (and its affiliate organizations) and their immediate family; members of the project advisory committee; members of the technical and design juries and their immediate family and/or architectural firms; sponsors and sponsoring corporations; staff members of the planning departments at the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale and Tempe and their immediate family.

Staff members of a sponsoring corporation may independently submit to the competition as individual participants in teams that include others not employed by the sponsoring corporation/firm.

About SMoCA
Mission: The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art champions creativity, innovation and the vitality of the visual arts. We seek both to build and to educate audiences for modern and contemporary art, as well as to provide opportunities for the artistic community—locally, nationally and internationally. SMoCA provides a memorable experience of art, architecture and design by exploring new curatorial approaches and by highlighting cultural context. We interpret, exhibit, collect and preserve works in these media.

Located in the center of one of America’s fastest growing and most dynamic regional economies, SMoCA contributes to its communities' vitality and provides a forum for creative dialog. The Museum is dedicated to advancing public awareness and knowledge of architecture and design, building on the proud legacy of visionary architecture in this community, epitomized by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti.

Founded in 1999, the Museum is a unique and vital cultural resource for the Southwest, serving local audiences as well as visitors from throughout the United States and abroad. Designed by award-winning architect Will Bruder, SMoCA's minimalist building has five galleries for showcasing changing exhibitions and works from the Museum's growing permanent collection. SMoCA also features an outdoor sculpture garden housing James Turrell's Knight Rise, one of the renowned artist's few public skyspaces, and Scrim Wall, a monumental curtain of prismatic glass by James Carpenter Design Associates. The Museum presents a wide variety of educational programs and special events for adults and families, including lectures, docent-led tours, workshops and classes. See www.smoca.org.

About Jones Kroloff Design Services
Jones Kroloff Design Services, www.joneskroloff.com, is the competition advisor. Led by Casey Jones (formerly of the U.S. General Services Administration Design Excellence Program and a founder of Van Alen Institute, an architecture and urban design research center) and Reed Kroloff (director of Cranbrook Academy of Art and Museum and former editor-in-chief of Architecture magazine), the firm has managed many of the recent major architectural competitions across the country, including: Design the High Line in New York, the September 11th Memorial Competition for the Pentagon, the Brad Pitt / Global Green Sustainable Design Competition for New Orleans, the Jose Vasconcuelos National Library of Mexico, and the Motown Center for Detroit, MI. Jones Kroloff is known internationally for its vast knowledge of both emerging and established architects and its expertise in managing complex competitions that yield functional and forward-thinking results.