Bringing fresh eyes to the Brickbottom

They have come from afar. They have piercing blue eyes. They have studied this city and have enormous plans to change it.

Fear not. They may be aliens, but they mean us no harm. They also hold Austrian passports.

This month, Florian Fanta and Simon Gassner, two architecture students from Graz University of Technology in Austria, spent 3 1/2 weeks here studying Somerville's Brickbottom District. Their proposal to redevelop the 45-acre site will not only become their joint master's thesis, it will be their entry for a design competition sponsored by Somerville and the Boston Society of Architects called ''EDGE as CENTER: envisioning the postindustrial landscape."

Young designers like Fanta and Gassner make this competition particularly exciting, said Alexandra Lee, the BSA's director of special projects. Lee said the contest attracted more than 200 entrants, urban planners and students alike, from 20 states, eight universities, and 20 countries, including Mexico, Taiwan, Australia, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Ukraine.

The Brickbottom District site's complexity and potential have proved to be enticing. Setting no budgetary limits, the competition brief asks entrants to consider a multitude of redevelopment issues: the site's present and historical uses and environmental problems; the city's relative lack of housing and open space; its loss of commercial tax base; its strained public transportation system and infrastructure; the new focus on smart growth; and Somerville's identity as an artistic hub.

''It's a pretty compelling topic," Lee said.

The $35,000 in prize money didn't discourage entries, either. (Registration for the contest closed on March 31.)

Fanta, 26, and Gassner, 25, learned of the competition through an Internet search. Brickbottom intrigued them, they said, because it dovetailed with their own interests in urban-scale redevelopment.

There was ''the possibility to develop our own design philosophy," Fanta said.

Unlike most juried architectural competitions, ''EDGE as CENTER" was intended to generate broad, pie-in-the-sky design concepts, rather than practical, concrete plans, according to its organizers.

''In these ideas competitions, you often get radical ideas," Lee said. ''The purpose is to push, to enable a dialogue to take place, to capture some really big ideas and figure how to work them into the final design."

At their school in Graz, Fanta and Gassner studied plans and photographs of Brickbottom, but resisted coming up with their proposal until after touring the site firsthand. Once in Somerville, they spent several days wandering the district, making notes, taking pictures, and trying to ''map the atmosphere, how you feel, trying to capture the different moods," Fanta said.

Because the entries aren't due till May 26, the Austrians were reluctant to reveal their ideas to a reporter. But the general focus of their concept for the new Brickbottom, Gassner said, is ''how to reconnect this [area] to the rest of the city." Barrier number one -- the McGrath Highway, which cleaves the site in two both physically and psychologically.

''People think, 'I don't want to go under that highway,' " he said. One of their ideas is to redesign the McGrath into a boulevard, with adjacent housing that would alter the neighborhood character from ''simply being destinations" to a place of residence.

Fanta lived in Oregon as a high school exchange student, but Somerville was Gassner's first encounter with the United States. His initial impressions? Austrian cities like Graz have a different approach to space and land use.

''Industrial areas get recycled faster; land is more valuable," he said. ''For many Americans, space is something quite inexhaustible."

''Everything here is just a little bit more," Fanta added. ''It would be next to impossible to build something like a Target store in Austria."

If they win, they will be given the opportunity to consult with the mayor's office on the site's development, even though the details of their victorious plan would probably never see the light of day.

But to Florian Fanta and Simon Gassner, who returned home on Tuesday, being declared runner-up could be even more desirable.

''We would be happy to receive a prize," said Fanta. ''But one of the interesting things in architecture is that the best projects often do not win, but come in second. This is probably due to the fact the judges might be a bit afraid of innovation and grand gestures.

''Therefore, the real goal is to be second."

Ethan Gilsdorf, who lives in Somerville, can be reached at ethan@ethangilsdorf.com.