One of HKS’ many design fellowships, the Southeast Fellowship (SDF) is a design charrette that seeks to cultivate emerging talent, simulate innovative design approaches and provide service to nearby communities. Each year, the SDF rotates between the HKS Atlanta, Miami, and Orlando offices to offer regional design thinking for local design challenges.

As cities and landscapes evolve, this year’s Southeast Design Fellowship (SDF) highlighted the important role of design in fostering resilient, equitable communities. The program brought together eight students and eight HKS designers to investigate the transformative potential of adaptive reuse through socially responsive design and sustainable urban development. Using a multi-scalar lens, the fellows redefined the identity and function of underutilized spaces while addressing pressing regional challenges.

The Prompt

Hosted in Miami, the fellowship focused on reimagining Midway Crossings (formerly Mall of the Americas), an underutilized shopping mall with significant potential for community impact. The building was divided into four quadrants, each assigned to a team to transform specific interior and exterior areas. Teams were challenged to develop community-centered programs that balanced creative expression with strategic problem-solving, selecting a primary focus area (education, healthcare, community, or culture), and integrating a residential component above the existing structure. These interventions aimed to enhance livability, introduce affordable housing and workforce living opportunities, and envision a more inclusive, sustainable future for the neighborhood. The resulting work reflected a diverse range of innovative, implementable ideas that celebrated adaptive reuse by retaining and reimagining the mall’s existing columns, slabs and structure as the foundation for new programs.

The Site

To better understand the space, four teams of four (two HKS fellows and two Student Fellows) explored the mall through an engaging scavenger hunt questionnaire, with the top-performing team selecting their preferred quadrant and program. Each quadrant served as a distinct area of study within the adaptive reuse framework, allowing teams to refine the exterior envelope to express a renewed civic identity and environmental responsibility. While each team developed a unique character for their quadrant, collaboration ensured a cohesive overall aesthetic and a unified, adaptive reuse solution. Structural amplification strategies were considered to support vertical additions, providing long-term adaptability and enabling the integration of new housing above the existing framework.

Finding Common Ground

With four neighboring sites assigned to four separate teams, there was a risk that the resulting proposals could feel fragmented or disconnected. To address this challenge, the fellows began the process with a collaborative charrette before developing their individual proposals. During this session, each team proposed a shared design rule to guide the collective vision, establishing a set of common design principles to be carried through the final work. This early forum for collaboration allowed teams to understand one another’s emerging ideas, align on key priorities, and identify elements essential to creating continuity across the site, resulting in a more cohesive and integrated set of proposals.

Midway Canopy

Team Midway Revival: Guorun Yang, Maria Guruceaga, Luna Pedrosa, Nicole Knopfholz Daitschman

The Midway Canopy proposal redefines urban development as a wellness ecosystem. At its core, the project explores the intersection of human health and environmental stewardship. By implementing an elevated urban deck, the design introduces a “tactile landscape” that prioritizes the sensory experience of the user while addressing vital environmental needs. This green infrastructure acts as biophilic lungs for the site, utilizing dense vegetation to combat urban heat islands and integrating advanced drainage strategies to ensure long-term resiliency against rising flood risks.

The project’s identity is driven by a “wellness loop,” a programmatic thread that starts at the street level and wraps the building in a lush, vertical canopy. This loop transitions from a public entrance into an immersive rooftop deck, creating a seamless flow between the outdoors and the interior wellness suites. These spaces are specifically programmed to foster community engagement and physical activity. Furthermore, Midway Canopy serves as a tribute to its context: it is envisioned as a cultural landmark that honors and amplifies the Latin American heritage of the local community, creating a vibrant, inclusive destination for future generations.

FLUX

Team JASD: So Min Park, Diana Juarez-Montaño, Aneri Trivedi, John Blake

Flux reimagines urbanism as a dynamic, interconnected domestic space where movement becomes a form of belonging. In Miami, a city defined by its unique cultural fusion and ever-evolving identity, this new transit hub serves as both a literal and symbolic connection point. Exploring movement as belonging, Flux integrates a hostel as part of the broader civic ecosystem, expanding access to the city, welcoming visitors and temporary residents. This living component is conceived not as an isolated program, but as an extension of the transit hub where dwelling, movement, and civic life intersect. Flux is about connection and integrating a space that bridges the complex relationships between people, transit and the city itself.

The Living Archive

Team AD²: Ailin Wei, Drew Dunphy, Ana Lucia Rodriguez-Valdes, Danielle Hackett

As the team focused on education, AD2  proposed a concept grounded in flexibility, restoration, and community empowerment. Centered around a public library, the district provides learning resources and shared spaces. Mass timber is used as the main structural system for its adaptability. An integrated landscape that creates an indoor–outdoor transition and serves as a learning amphitheater.

The Art Wave

Team Hybrid Atelier: Juan Jose Chinchilla, Karalina Shastavets, Jeel Patel, Thomas Hebert

This project intends to revitalize the site and surrounding area by fostering a new community center celebrating local artists and culture, while remaining accessible to the surrounding Miami-Dade population.

Grounded as an adapt-and-reuse proposal, this design utilizes the existing structural systems of the Midway Crossing Mall and introduces a new sweeping roof structure as a symbolic icon/gesture of local creativity. The goal is to foster a space for collaboration and inclusivity by offering programs for teaching and learning, as well as maintaining an open floor plan to maximize visibility and opportunities for cross-pollination among artistic professions. Rooted in Miami’s dynamic culture, the design celebrates the city’s diverse artistic heritage while cultivating a living canvas for collaboration among creators of all backgrounds, it is a space where art becomes both the language and the landscape.

Crossing the Finish Line

What emerged from an intense weekend of collaboration and experimentation were four design proposals that extended the conversation on adaptive reuse as a critical method for responding to the shifting needs of contemporary cities. Collectively, the projects demonstrate how underutilized spaces can be reimagined as flexible, community-centered environments that address social, economic and environmental challenges. Grounded in research and strengthened through interdisciplinary dialogue, the proposals reflect a shared commitment to design as a tool for resilience, innovation, and positive urban transformation. Together, they underscore the potential of collaborative design processes to generate thoughtful, forward-looking solutions that are both locally responsive and broadly applicable.

SDF 2025 Fellows

SDF 2025 Committee

Sponsors

Thank you to the SDF 2025 Sponsors.

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