Baltimore has dozens of memorable neighborhoods, but it was a sand sculpture of Canton that won the top prize in the annual CitySand competition at the Inner Harbor.
“Canton Waterfront” by Moffatt & Nichol Engineers took the Golden Shovel award in the CitySand 2024 competition held on Saturday at Harborplace. “Building Blocks of a Neighborhood,” by Moseley Architects, received the People’s Choice award.
The contest was organized by the Baltimore Architecture Foundation (BAF); the Waterfront Partnership of Baltimore; Southway Builders and MCB Real Estate, the owner of Harborplace. Nine teams of architects, engineers and landscape architects braved the heat on Saturday to create sculptures that responded to this year’s theme: “Celebrating Baltimore’s Neighborhoods.”
In addition to Moffatt & Nichol and Moseley, participants included: Architecture By Design; BCT Design Group; Design Collective; Gensler and Mahan Rykiel; Hanbury; LandDesign and Ruppert Companies.
Themes ranged from Baltimore stoops (“A place to connect with the community”) to 3-D postcards (“Greetings from Baltimore!”) There were sand stadiums, sand crabs, sand painted screens, a sand USS Constellation, a sand Mr. Boh, a sand Hard Rock Café guitar and a sand flamingo.
Moffatt & Nichol’s tribute to Canton was a faithful recreation of the neighborhood, from Tindeco Wharf to Lighthouse Point to neighboring Patterson Park and its pagoda. The firm had something of a head start: it has offices at Lighthouse Point.
Moseley baked a layer cake with three ingredients that are characteristic of classic rowhouse neighborhoods in Baltimore: rowhouses on the bottom layer, parks in the middle, and a crab on top. “These are the things that create community,” said Moseley designer David Plent.
The judges were Shauntee Daniels, executive director of the Baltimore National Heritage Area; Annie Milli, executive director of Live Baltimore; Liz Koontz, assistant deputy mayor for Community and Economic Development; Nakita Reed, an architect at Quinn Evans and president of the BAF and P. David Bramble, managing partner and co-founder of MCB.
An impressive late entry came from Oliver Sandoval, 4, who took over a sand lot not assigned to a design team. With help from his father Jonathan, a development director at MCB, Oliver worked along with the professional teams throughout the morning. Though he didn’t receive one of the top awards, he clearly established himself as an architect to watch in the future.
