Bradley Fink and Michael Christoff are products of the new school of architecture, looking beyond walls and ramparts to reconnect with the urban landscape. When they graduated a few years ago from Kent State University, Fink with a Bachelor’s and Christoff with a Master’s in Architecture, the pair was not content to just start drafting away in some back corner, albeit for two of Cleveland’s well-respected firms—Fink at Westlake Reed Leskosky and Christoff at Forum Architects.

Like many of their peers, they surf the web. Particularly blogs with names like Death by Architecture, which draw an international readership of budding young draftsmen with perhaps more spare time than the family guys in the field.

They noticed two things: that many cities without nearly the legacy of Cleveland were drawing interest for design competitions, and that the viral effect of the Web made it possible to dare dream that they could host one. Thus, the Cleveland Design Competition was born.

Now all they needed was some off-line support. They started by calling Bill Mason, a local architect who served on Christoff’s thesis committee and who introduced them to Greg Peckham, director of Cleveland Public Art.

“Brad and Mike are full of enthusiasm and good ideas,” Peckham says. “I didn’t have financial resources, but I was willing to commit my time.” He enlisted the help of Steve Rugare of the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative; both serve as advisors.

Next, a mix of Gen-Y nimbleness and a heavy commitment of personal time over the past 18 months researching competitions, building a web site and an RFP—and a few, well-placed emails along the way—led to a world-class jury and a key sponsorship from Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a national organization which has ties to Cleveland industrial giant, Lincoln Electric.

How did two inexperienced twentysomethings manage to pull it off?

“I can’t imagine us being able to do this without computers, the Internet and the online community,” Fink says. “I was surprised how easy it was.”

For instance, a friend of Christoff’s emailed Lincoln and pitched them based on the interest from their recent documentary, "Cleveland: Confronting Decline in an American City". That opened the floodgates. Jurors came on board including Zoe Ryan, Curator of Design at the Art Institute of Chicago; Ken Greenberg, an architect and urban designer practicing in Toronto; and Paul Alsenas, Cuyahoga County Planning Commission director.

So, what is the Cleveland Design Competition? It's an ideas competition to drive dialogue around an underused area of the city—in this case the old Irish Town Bend section of the west bank of the Flats, just below CMHA’s Riverview Tower in Ohio City.

“Cleveland seems to have a difficult time getting outside itself and discussing its problems,” Christoff says. “We’re raising awareness of a site and providing an opportunity for someone to study it and come up with solutions.”

“It’s about how post-industrial cities can revitalize their waterfronts,” Fink adds. “This site has a lot of history, and a lot of recent plans.”

The pair provide resource links on their site to current planning efforts, including CMHA’s redevelopment of the tower and proposed park surrounding it; ODOT’s Intermodal Truck Connector; a green bulkhead pilot project; Don Harvey’s Natural Flats project; they even discovered that part of the hillside is a registered historic site where an archeology team from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History discovered remnants of the original Irish community.

The Web has helped attract traffic and submissions from Europe and Asia; their site is getting 150 unique visitors a day. National print publications caught wind, as well, with Architecture, publishing an article on the competition and Metropolis magazine including it in their design competition listing.

“We looked at a lot of design competitions,” Christoff says. “The High Line (to reuse an old elevated freight rail line in Manhattan’s Meat Packing District) was an ideas competition and the suspended park wasn’t even the winner, but it raised the bar.

“Cleveland's been told so many times what it cannot do with sites like this. We need to forget what we can’t do and first consider what do we want to do?”

Regular submissions deadline is April 16, 2007, with late registration until April 23. For more information or to register, go here.