2014 Fuller Challenge Celebration at The Wythe Hotel

BFI held its seventh annual Fuller Challenge Award Ceremony and Celebration last week at The Wythe Hotel. Fuller Challenge Winner Kate Orff accepted the OmniOculi sculpture and $100,000 prize on behalf of Living Breakwaters and the SCAPE / LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PLLC team.

Below is a selection of BFI’s Executive Director, Elizabeth Thompson’s, welcome to those who joined us for the evening.

When conceiving the Challenge program, we looked at other major prizes seeking to impact the general domain of sustainability. Many well-intentioned award initiatives recognize stand-alone technology innovations or interventions into specific environments in need, often employing reductionist strategies to isolate and solve a symptomatic issue, rather than its more complex root cause. No program focused on a whole systems approach or emphasized integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory strategies. No one was awarding the Trimtabs.

Our first call for proposals went out in the fall of 2007, and the last 7 years have been a deeply rewarding experiment and experience. We have found those rare, inspired individuals and teams whose commitment to making the world work for all has driven them to leave behind conventional approaches and expectations to design new ways to think, plan and solve some of the most entrenched and pressing problems we face today.