Last week, Meg Daly, Founder of Friends of The Underline, and Hamish Smyth, associate partner Pentagram and creator of The Underline’s identity and branding, presented at Architizer and MAS‘s “Pitching The City” in New York City.  Delivering one and half years of momentum and activity into a 5-minute presentation wasn’t easy, but The Underline was voted the winner by the audience from a field of five contenders.

It came down to the wire last Friday night as the full-house audience at St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral watched the real-time results of the text-to-vote poll on the big screen, but one team emerged victorious: by the time MC Ilya Marritz called it, the Underline prevailed over the East River Skyway by a single vote.

Of course, all five of the finalists put forth their best effort at “pitching the city” or presenting their big urban idea in the second edition of this signature event, part of the New Museum’s biennial IDEAS CITY Festival. Brought to you by Architizer and the Municipal Art Society (MAS), the dynamic live-pitch event invited five “pitchers” to take to the stage and present their proposals for improving contemporary cities (+POOL won the first time around, in 2013) in front of a panel of four esteemed judges: Majora Carter (Startup Box), Shohei Shigematsu (OMA), Scott Anderson (Control Group), and Michelle Mullineaux (Blue State Digital). Free and open to the public, Pitching the City culminated with a public vote in which the audience was invited to consider both the concepts themselves and the judges’ feedback to determine a winner.

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