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Friday, February 4, 2011
Which is one of the many ideas you can submit to the Chicago Architectural Club's annual Burnham Prize Competition.
This year's competition, McCormick Place REDUX, is “intended to examine the controversial origins and questionable future of the McCormick Place East Building, the 1971 modernist convention hall designed by Gene Summers of C.F. Murphy Associates and sited along the lakefront in Burnham Park.”
Built on parkland meant to be “forever open, clear, and free”, considered an eyesore by open space advocates, and suffering from benign neglect at the hands of its owners, the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, Gene Summer’s design for McCormick Place East is nevertheless a powerfully elegant exploration of some of modernism’s deepest concerns. The current building’s predecessor generated withering criticism from civic groups so when it burned in 1967 its critics mobilized. The raw economic power of the convention business served to hasten rebuilding atop the ruins. But while Shaw’s previous building lacked any architectural merit, Gene Summers brought to the new project his years of experience at Mies van der Rohe’s side. The resulting building is a tour de force that succinctly caps the modernist dream of vast heroic column-free interior spaces.
[...]
The “McCormick Place REDUX” competition seeks to launch a debate about the future of this significant piece of architecture, this lakefront site that was effectively removed from the public realm, and the powerful pull of a collective and public claim on the lakefront. This iconic building is caught in the crossfire of a strong, principled, and stirring debate. So the question posed by the competition is quite simple: what would you do with this massive facility? What alternate role might the building play in Chicago should it be decommissioned as a convention hall? And if the building were to go away, how might the site be utilized? What might you do with a million square feet of space on Chicago’s lakefront (along with 4,200 seat Arie Crown theatre)?
Will you, as Chicago Tribune's architecture critic Blair Kamin suggested, propose to tear the entire building down and restitch the lakefront's splintered parkland?
Despite one of its member's aversion to ideas competitions, it would be awesome to see an entry from the FAT gang.
You have until 4 April 2011 to send in your proposals.
(Im)possible Chicago #6
Monday, January 17, 2011
Here's the brief of the just announced international competition organized by MAS Studio and the Chicago Architectural Club.
Proposed by John S. Wright in 1849, the system was envisioned twenty years later when the State Legislature established the South, West, and Lincoln Park Commissions. Also referred as the “Emerald Necklace” since the 1893 World Columbian Exposition, it is composed by a series of streets and parks, some of them designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and William Le Baron Jenney. After the mid-twentieth century, the lack of proper funding, the split of management of the system as a whole (parks would be managed separately from the streets) and the migration of residents to the suburbs were some of the circumstances that accelerated the deterioration of the system. While portions of it, such as the Logan Square Boulevards District (an official city landmark district since 2005) still maintain the original character, other parts have just become underutilized areas and oversized streets that act as barriers within neighborhoods.
That is where we are now and this competition asks you to envision where we can be in the near future. These are some of the questions that we are asking ourselves and we want you to think about in your proposal: What if the system becomes a new transportation corridor in the city? What type of transportation would that be? What if the open space becomes an active layer and not just a passive one? What if this system provides activities that the city as a whole is lacking? What if the system becomes a tool for social cohesion? What if the system has a strong visual identity? What if it becomes an economic catalyst for the neighborhoods? What if the system is all of this and more?
Participants are asked to look at the urban scale and propose a framework for the entire boulevard system as well as provide answers and visualize the interventions at a smaller scale that can directly impact its potential users. Through images, diagrams and drawings we want to know what are those soft or hard, big or small, temporary or permanent interventions that can reactivate and reset the Boulevard System of Chicago.
Submission deadline is Monday, February 21, 2011.
Hopefully by predicting that we'll be seeing entries proposing the ubiquitous urban farm and alternative energy generating field, we won't actually be seeing too many of those.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
We really like the idea of the 72 Hour Urban Action, a rapid, real-time architecture competition at the 2010 Bat-Yam International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Israel.
For this DIY pow-wow, organizers invite ten teams of architects, students, designers, artists and craftspeople who will be tasked “to respond to community needs and wants in relations to its public spaces.” Each team will be given up to $2,500 for materials, room and board, a central work space and a truck for transport. Engineers will also be on hand for construction and safety consultations. Starting on September 25, 2010, the launch date of the biennale, the teams will have three days and three nights to design and build their projects, some of which will be chosen to remain on site permanently. There's also a money prize worth $3,800 for the top project.
The deadline for registration is August 8, 2010. That's only a few days away, so if you're interested, you'll have to hustle.
Meanwhile, perhaps the entire Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 could be turned into a massive 72 Hour Urban Action festival. Instead of installing also-rans from the previous year's Art Biennale or taking the pickings from an august atelier's dusty model museums or asking Zaha Hadid to make another sofa, the architecture world's elite and bright young tykes are flown in, given a slightly plumper budget and then let loose in Venice and the surrounding salt marshes, with some perhaps venturing inland to the industrial landscapes of Veneto.
Just as at Bat-Yam, they have 3 days (could be longer) to design and build a project that meets a local social need or improves the urban experience. Biennale groupies can watch the teams while they work and then play around in/with the completed spatial interventions. They might even be asked to lend an extra pair of helping hands to hammer a few nails, to the horrors of biennale lawyers and insurance people. And in case you're wondering, the teams will be housed, fed and given working spaces at the Arsenale or in their country's pavilion.
Also like at Bat-Yam, some of the projects will be allowed to remain permanently. Every couple of years, new projects are plugged-in to the built environment, perhaps even to an earlier intervention. In this way, Venice and its environs are continually reshaped and renewed.
After countless biennales, we might have two Venices. There's La Serenissima, flooded and crumbling. Above it is the newer Venice built out of all the accumulated projects. This encrustation of ad hoc interventions is where the indigenous Venetians live and work, where the tourists buy their souvenirs after venturing down to the ancient city below.
Monday, May 31, 2010
Still need something to do this summer? How about revisiting some of your much cherished childhood (or yesterday's) dreamscapes of a fantastical lunar city and then propping it (or not) with a bit of scientific credibility for SHIFTboston's Moon Capital competition.
When considering the moon destination, competitors are welcome to explore any concept, however, we recommend the submission address one of the following criteria:
PROTECTION The moon has no atmosphere. Envision shielding to protect the habitat from radiation, space debris, and temperature extremes.
MICRO-GRAVITY How would life and industry be in 1/6g?
FOOD A self-sustaining community that incorporates agriculture and food production.
ENERGY How would we harness or generate enough energy to run an entire community?
WATER production, purification and recycling.
How about a moon CULTURE?
How about a moon TRANSPORTATION?
This might be just the perfect opportunity for you to team up with those civil engineering students on the other side of campus to help you better understand constructing on indigenous soil material. If you're thinking of designing a lunar food system, surely you would want to exploit the expertise of a lunar farmer. Are you wondering if the entire moon could be turned into a gigantic battery? No doubt our readers already know who to consult first.
In any case, it's probably no different from designing for extreme environments here on earth, or a second Phoenix in a much harsher desert. Perhaps it's better to conceptualize your city as a company mining town, after all an independent moon would be more likely be supported by an exo-natural resource-based economy than tourism or scientific research, right?
Submission deadline is September 3, 2010.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Architecture for Humanity must be after our hearts!
Access to Trestles, one of North America’s most celebrated waves, is under threat due to safety and environmental concerns. Currently, over 100,000 people each year follow informal trails through wetlands and over active train tracks to gain access to the surf breaks at Trestles. These impromptu manmade paths present a safety hazard with passing trains and threaten the fragile ecosystem of Trestles.
In response, a coalition of concerned groups organized by the volunteer non-profit organization Architecture for Humanity, are launching Safe Trestles, an open-to-all, two-stage design competition to create a safe pathway to serve surfers, the local coastal community and day visitors to San Onofre State Beach. This coalition is looking for cohesive designs that eliminate the danger of crossing active train tracks, help to restore wetlands that have been damaged by the present path, preserve and improve vistas, and offer education about the history of the site and the beach marsh environment. The new path should ensure continued access to the resources by all members of our community and adhere to Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards.
While placing no limitations on the originality or imaginativeness of design ideas, we are looking for tangible low-impact solutions that can actually be built at a future date. Ideally, the winning entry will be sensitive to the remote and undisturbed nature of the area—providing safe access without compromising the pristine environment and views of this rare example of natural Southern California coast.
The deadline for registration and submission is April 17, 2010.
Once you've fully reviewed the project brief and guidelines, check out the comment section where there is an interesting discussion about the need for such a competition. One commenter appears to be arguing that since a self-perceived element of hazard is an important part of the landscape's character, a designed access path “will just take the adventure away and whole surfing experience.” The landscape is sublime, and making it “safer” would betray this supposedly inherent nature.
Setting aside the question of just how one goes about determining the “true” nature of landscapes (there's no such thing, if you were wondering), is there a design solution that will give you the best of both worlds: sublimity and ADA approval? Where is that balance? Does one even have to strive for balance, aiming instead for a strategy that's unequal parts feral wilderness and bureaucratic restrictions?
Perhaps we're bringing our own baggage to the discussion but territoriality seems to be bubbling just below the surface of the comments critical of the competition. Reading between the lines, we suspect that inaccessibility is being seen as a filter separating those who don't mind and indeed can navigate the dangers of passing trains (e.g., surfers) from the public at large. The former have proprietary use over this beach while the latter are interlopers. A safer route would presumably bring the wrong kinds of users, the “rude people” (non-surfers?) who “go off the paths” and “will bring trash.” If you're on a wheelchair or intimidated by informal trails or a non-surfer, this landscape just isn't for you. But should it remain “closed” to you? Should (and could) this space be made a bit more egalitarian?
In any case, we're very excited about this competition, and can't wait to see all the submissions, not just the finalists.
Pure Geography
Sea Change
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Here's another competition, and it's organized by the Chicago Architectural Club. The site is the Chicago Spire hole.
The Chicago Architectural Club is pleased to announce the 2010 Chicago Prize Competition: MINE THE GAP, a single-stage international design ideas competition dedicated to examining one of the most visible scars left after the collapse of the real estate market in Chicago: the massive hole along the Lake Michigan shore that was to have been—and may yet be—the foundation for a singular 150-story condominium tower designed by an internationally-renowned Spanish architect, a tower which was to have become a new icon for the city and region. What to do with the gap? Whether or not the project is resuscitated, what else can we do with this strategic and highly-charged site? Once the motor of real-estate speculation has stalled, what can we use to propel ourselves, and the discipline, forward?
We're still pining for subterranean skydiving, but we'd be happy if it gets turned into a mushroom farm as a satellite venue for the world's largest annual food orgy, the Taste of Chicago.
Entries can be submitted online between March 22, 2010 and May 3, 2010.
Registrations for the Land Art Generator Initiative competition are finally being accepted.
The goal of the competition is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to thousands of homes.
Note that this is foremost an art competition, meaning “the installations are art first, power plants second. There may need to be sacrifices to be made in terms of efficiency of energy generation in order that the design function primarily on a conceptual and aesthetic level. The objective is not to design and engineer a device that provides the cheapest KWh or the most energy per square meter of land.”
The deadline is June 4, 2010.
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Coinciding with the next issue (#18) of Kerb, the annual landscape architecture journal edited by students at RMIT, Melbourne, is their first ever international design competition, PlastiCity FantastiCity. The competition brief sounds wildly open ended, which could frustrate some but hopefully will only foster astonishing visions of the future city.
Imagine the limitless world of a child. Creative boundaries have not yet been conceived, limits not yet understood. We want to see your city in all its wildness. A child can compose a world of immeasurable fantasy and pleasure yet the regulations that we currently adhere to have diminished our ability to make this our reality.
What if when you take a lunch break, parks literally broke from the earth, airlifted above the clouds escaping into the sunlight, landing within the hour leaving you at peace with the world?
PlastiCity FantastiCity is remodeling the constructed city at any chosen scale to become a world of playful opportunity, where nothing that manifests itself in today's cities is present. This ideas competition seeks a multidisciplinary approach to discover new potentials and possibilities within the world and in particular for the Landscape Architecture profession.
The registration deadline is December 18, 2009, and the submission deadline for panels is January 18, 2010.
Winners will receive cash prizes in addition to page spreads in Kerb 18.
Saturday, September 19, 2009
There are still two weeks left in this year's International Garden Festival at the Jardin de Métis/Reford Gardens in Quebec, but organizers have already sent out the call for proposals for next year's festival.
The theme will be Paradise.
From the competition brief:
Since time immemorial mankind has re-imagined the idea of paradise on earth through the garden and has imagined places of great beauty. These places, by evoking our senses, have pulled us out of our everyday world to experience the sublime.
What does paradise look like today?
By reading paradise in different directions (not only the religious one), designers are invited to frame the theme by using, for example, the notion of the landscape or garden as a metaphor and framework to support a story or myth, whether religious or not. Another direction to explore would be to frame paradise within the technical or pragmatic imperative to recover the world in its primeval state prior to the destructive forces that are perceived to be undermining the environment; the notion of the lost state of “nature” as a kind of environmental and technical ideal. It would also be interesting to explore the notion of Utopia, bringing the metaphoric ideas of paradise within the realm of the real.
Building on emerging practices in landscape architecture, we ask you to imagine your garden of paradise; a creation that will speak to the history of gardening, to philosophy, to religion and to history in general, as well as to contemporary society and to your own personal history. This contemporary garden should be considered as an exploration, an experimentation and a strong expression of community. It will be a complex landscape, living and responding to the human condition, a composition of natural and artificial elements that will give meaning to everyday life. Proposed projects must demonstrate through the use of new practices the role that landscape architecture may be expected to play in our current historical and social context.
The deadline is November 6, 2009. If selected, you will be given a budget of C$25,000 to develop and construct your installation.
Returning to Métis/Reford
Sonic Garden
Poule mouillée!
Dymaxion Sleeps
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art is challenging artists to design a universal warning sign that will deter our many-times-great-grandchildren from entering a nuclear waste dump site.
How do you create a warning system to prevent an accidental unearthing of 200 million pounds of radioactive nuclear waste? A simple sign, some chain link and a military post, might work today. But what about 10,000 years from now? In 2002 the U.S. Department of Energy brought together engineers, archaeologists, anthropologists and linguists and asked them this question. What type of warning system can be put in place so people, 370 generations from now, won’t open the glowing door?
What they came up with is hardly inspiring: a large earthen mound with a salt core and two identical Dr. Strangelove-esque control rooms with a warning message written in the six official languages of the U.N. and Navajo. Construction of this Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is scheduled to begin in less than three years.
What if an artist designed the system?
Of course, “architects, cartoonists, computer engineers, graphic designers and scientists” can also submit proposals.
There was a similar competition held years ago. The project site was the (now cancelled) nuclear waste depository at Yucca Mountain. Of the proposals, we wrote that none of them will keep people away.
Build a field of menacing concrete spikes, and it becomes a popular destination. CLUI will send busloads of tourists.
What should be done in the intervening thousands of year is to develop an anti-radiation pill or the fast-acting anti-tumor pill, so that with these miraculous medical breakthroughs, future travelers will go on so-called radiation tours.
As you walk through the excavated labyrinth of Yucca Mountain, you become listless, nauseous. Going deeper and deeper into the caverns — damp, mildewed surfaces; stale air; pyramids of light falling heavily on your weakening body — you begin to have what will become the worst migraine of your life.
Then your hair falls off.
Others in your group had taken a different path and are now suffering from beta burns. Still others, on a different scenic route, are vomiting every few steps, their nose bleeding.
But obviously, all is well; you've taken the pills. Radiation poisoning is as safe as a Disney ride or a stroll through the park.
As a souvenir you can buy a wig at the gift shop.
It's the national park of the future.
Sunday, July 12, 2009
At the moment, there are no project sites, no deadlines, no jury and no sponsors to announce, let alone what coming in first place will mean, either receiving a cash prize or a commission or both. But if and when the logistics are properly set up, Land Art Generator Initiative could be a fascinating competition to follow.
From the project statement, emphasis theirs:
The goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative (LAGI) is to design and construct Land Art / Environmental Art installations in the United Arab Emirates that have the added benefit of large scale clean energy generation. Each sculpture will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid with each land art sculpture having the potential to provide power to up to 50,000 homes in the UAE.
How about a frozen desert artificially gouged with wind-damned canyons?
There is a blog, bLAGI, in which you can check for any updates.
Monday, May 4, 2009
We don't know if our readers are as interested in coastlines as we are, but we do want to point out a new competition to generate ideas for a near-future San Francisco and environs inundated by sea level rise caused by climate change and with a population perhaps too unwilling to be displaced.
To grapple with the realities of sea level rise, a new suite of shoreline design concepts is needed. The Rising Tides ideas competition seeks responses to various design challenges, such as: How do we build in an area that is dry now, but that may be wet in the future? How do we retrofit existing shoreline infrastructure such as shipping ports, highways, airports, power plants and wastewater treatment plants? Can we imagine a different shoreline configuration or settlement pattern that allows temporary inundation from extreme storm events? And how do we provide flood protection inland of marshes without drowning the wetland when the water rises?
We're hoping not to see stilts and barges, because there are just too many of those littering other ideas competitions. How about more of this and less of this? But then again, we'll be eating everything up — any and all ideas — with sustained glee: monstrous Army Corps megaengineering; the Golden Gate Dam; stilt forests; mobile sewers; genetically modified water sucking post-arboreals; SpongeOakland; San Francisco, Utah; bay-to-river-to-rivulets land reclamation; Climate Refugee ID cards for an odd/even year system of temporary displacement; walking houses; container wetlands as wildlife preserves and wastewater treatment plants; The Super Awesome Supersurface of Super Awesomeness.
Submission entries must be postmarked by June 29.
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
While the science, technology and economics of turning algae into biofuel needs further research and refinement, that hasn't stopped designers from dreaming up projects using this new energy source as a point of departure in formal and systems experiments. We have been collecting many such projects over the past years and now would like to present some of the better ones to our readers in a series of posts. They vary in scales, deployment, logistics and context, so there should be something for everyone. Do take what you want from them.
We start with something regular readers will no doubt have seen before, from a year ago. The project is called Drip Feed, the winning entry from architects Thomas Raynaud and Cyrille Berger for the 2G Competition Venice Lagoon Park.
According to Raynaud and Berger:
Our project for the urban park of Sacca San Mattia consists of reinvesting the island in a Venetian, multi-functional approach to urban planning, in the context of an enlarged metropolitan, tourist centre. The Drip Feed project on the Island of Sacca San Mattia puts into place an above-ground ulva rigida cultivation device that is in keeping with the Greenfuel system. A saprophyte structure that ingests polluted waste from local industry, and conceptually redefines the lagoon’s future water level, without harming the natural state of the island.
In other words, algae from the lagoon will be harvested and “farmed” inside bioreactor tubings filled with water taken also from the lagoon.
This process of cultivation would produce the biofuel for the lagoon's transportation and somewhat incredibly, seaweed to feed the tourists. One other byproduct is oxygen, which would be used to reduce the eutrophication of the lagoon caused by industrial run-off. Supposedly, then, one would have to be careful not to reduce it too much or else a new source of algae would have to be found.
Since Venice is “codified as a city-diversion,” Ranaud and Berger wanted to program this site of production into a site of consumption as well. The tubes are arrayed trellis-like. Above and below this emerald ground plane are spaces for activities, for instance, outdoor concerts and camping.
Of course, the entire structure itself would be an attraction, an engineering marvel equal to the Renaissance churches and palazzos just across the lagoon. In fact, if the duo had followed the contours of the hills or better yet, sculpted some imaginary landforms into the structure, it might even compete with the sagging San Marco.
How about recreating the skyline of La Serenissima?
During aqua alta, unlucky tourists will rent gondolas and vaporetti to sail underneath striated onion domes and bulbous, vegetal skies, bathed in modulated light and shadows.
Until its time to eat an overpriced seaweed à la carte menu.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Princeton Architectural Press is once again seeking proposals for the next installment in its Pamphlet Architecture series. This time, however, it's not as open ended as previous calls for entries. They've got a theme: infrastructure.
At a time of new government leadership committed to investing in America's Infrastructure, architects, engineers, and artists should propose new directions for transportation, energy, and agriculture at a continental scale. In this spirit, no visionary dimension is too large, no inventive proposal too ambitious to consider.
(Emphasis ours.)
The deadline is July 1, 2009.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
In August this year, a design competition was launched to generate ideas to repurpose Quito's Mariscal Sucre International Airport after its planned closing in a couple of years.
According to the organizers, “the coming availability of 126 hectares of space with a flat topography, located in the midst of a consolidated area, which thanks to the decision of the Quito Metropolitan Council, will be transformed into a park, constitutes an exceptional event and a unique opportunity. This leads us to rethink the city and to take advantage of the opportunity to set forth solutions to multiple issues linked to: changes in the use and building capacity of land; improvement in mobility and transversal connectivity; expansion of infrastructure; provision of green areas and public spaces; improvement in environmental conditions, recovery of urban landscapes and environment; improvement of the quality of life of present and future inhabitants of the city.”
We only learned of this competition, because two teams that had submitted entries uploaded their images onto their Flickr accounts after the results were announced late last month. Both projects are quite spectacular, visually gorgeous and brimming with ideas. We'll post them separately, and should we find more entries and like what we see, we'll publish them here as well.
The first team, then, is Paisajes Emergentes, a studio collective based in Medellin and Bogota, Colombia. Its members include Luis Callejas, Edgar Mazo and Sebastian Mejia.
This is their Second Prize-winning entry, in all its linear awesomeness.
Per the competition brief, water has to be central element in the design. After all, the organizers refer to the future park as Parque del Lago.
In response, Paisajes Emergentes flooded the 3-kilometer runway to create an “active hydrologic park,” which they then partitioned into 6 programmatically discrete areas.
1. At the north end of the park are wetlands. These bioremediate water redirected from the other end of the park after having run its course through this outrageously elongated pool.
2. Relatively clean water from the wetlands is then used to fill an open air aquarium. The tanks here contain fluvial species from tropical ecosystems.
3. An aquatic botanical garden comes next in this hydrological assembly line. Whereas the faunal variety is showcased in the aquarium, tropical plants are the main attractions here, though both are equally essential to maintain any kind of a robust ecosystem.
4. From there, water moves into circular water tanks, where it is mechanically oxygenated and filtrated. Pedestrian walkways involve people with an infrastructure and a process that are usually hidden from them. Meanwhile, one has to question the placement of these tanks. Shouldn't it be at the head of the line to take care of the heavy duty stuff? Given the park's closed system and the proven ability of constructed wetlands to improve water quality biologically, is a “conventional” treatment plant, of that scale, even necessary?
5. In any case, the water must meet legal standards of quality if they are to fill the public pools and thermal baths. A combination of wind and solar energy is used to heat this aquatic complex.
6. Finally, we come to a recreational lake, where the water is collected in subterranean tanks to satisfy the need of irrigation systems and general maintenance of the park before.
Additional activities are also programmed adjacent to this central pool. For instance, the old terminal building is turned into a convention center. Soft materials and walls are removed, and the remaining forest of columns confine 3 theaters inside hanging gardens.
There is also an open air aviation museum, where a fleet of planes are allowed to rot in their obsolescence. A wetland fed by waters from the botanical garden is allowed colonize this area. In time, the planes become a sort of Picturesque ruins of the industrial age, sinking into deep mire, crumbling in the wilds.
Meanwhile, it would have been nice to see how the park relates to its context, apart from suggesting amenities the local community may (or may not) need. Graphically, the site looks divorced from the urban grid. All paths radiate out of the terminal building and one parking lot on the other half, then terminate just before they reach the edge of the park. Opportunities for more meaningful connectivity between the surrounding neighborhoods and between the north and south parts of the city seem to have been missed.
For more images, visit the Flickr account of Paisajes Emergentes.
Dispatches from a Post-Water Chicago
Treating Cancer with Landscape Architecture
Treating Acid Mine Drainage in Vintondale
Quito 2: Back to the Airport
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
The latest in a series of competitions sponsored by Urban Revision has begun. Previously, each competition had focused on an aspect of the urban block: energy in Re:Volt; transportation in Re:Route; and commerce in Re:Store.
In Re:Connect, participants are asked to focus on community.
More details:
The character of a neighborhood is a reflection of the people who live there. When people feel connected to a place, they feel more connected to one another. The community becomes an extended family and life more meaningful. Thus, we're looking for urban planning approaches where revamped environments bring current residents together, particularly families. This is a chance to repair the essential relationships between social work, nature and urban infill with ideas that value humanistic thinking and imagination over bulldozers. Ponder the kinds of structures and landscapes that typically exist in run-down areas and transform them into eco-wise spaces that make life better. How might you overcome the inevitable resistance to change, and harness the community's human resources? Introducing eldercare and childcare programs or sustainable landscaping with useable harvests might be just what's needed. The best plans, no matter their originality or scale, will aim to positively affect neighboring blocks as well.
If you're planning to approach this via landscape design, for inspiration, there's Kevin Robert Perry's stormwater management systems, the East Saint Louis Action Research Project and projects by the phenomenally great Walter Hood, specifically Courtland Creek, Lafayette Square Park and downtown Macon, Georgia's Poplar Street.
And since the last line in the competition brief quoted above did say that entries needn't be completely original, perhaps you can reinterpret Edible Estates or spatialize these John Pfahl photographs.
Would forming a militia of mechanized guerilla gardeners and then carrying out scouting patrols for and nighttime sabotage missions against barren patches of landscape around your city block make “people feel connected to a place?”
In any case, the registration deadline is June 1, and the submission deadline is June 15. However, these dates may change.
Good luck!
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Winners of the 2G Competition Venice Lagoon Park were announced last month and here are a couple of projects that caught our eyes.
First is the winning entry from architects Thomas Raynaud and Cyrille Berger. Presented with the slogan Drip Feed, they propose to turn one of the islands in the lagoon into a sort of algae power farm using organisms that already live in the tidal marshes to convert water pollution into clean energy.
It'll be a site of production and leisure.
Or as described by the Paris team: “Our project for the urban park of Sacca San Mattia consists of reinvesting the island in a Venetian, multi-functional approach to urban planning, in the context of an enlarged metropolitan, tourist centre. The Drip Feed project on the Island of Sacca San Mattia puts into place an above-ground ulva rigida cultivation device that is in keeping with the Greenfuel system. A saprophyte structure that ingests polluted waste from local industry, and conceptually redefines the lagoon’s future water level, without harming the natural state of the island.”
Second is the entry from the Spanish team of Josep Tornabell Teixidor, Gerard Bertomeu, Miriam Cabanes and Enrique Soriano. Called Instant Gel, their proposal also makes use of existing water-borne organism and pollutants but this time they are to be used to set off a chemical reaction with layers of flexible gelly structures, creating fantastical island-sized foamy water lilies.
The cranes in the image above suggest perhaps that in the future climate-changed Venice St. Mark's will be transferred onto one of these floating islands.
Or perhaps Askin Ozcar's fake Venice will be realized here. Duplicate canals, duplicate churches, duplicate palazzos, duplicate Venetians and duplicate film festival and biennales, all floating above and tethered to the lagoon. And every couple of years (another biennale of sorts), it gets disconnected to become a mobile museum, mall and casino.
Meanwhile, it's worth comparing Drip Feed to 202 Collaborative's hydrogen-powered Icelandic cities and Instant Gel to SpongeCity by Niall Kirkwood et al.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
The call for entries for the next Next Generation design competition is out, and this time the theme is on something very dear to Pruned's heart: WATER!
Water, glorious water! Magical water, wonderful water, marvelous water, fabulous water, beautiful water, glorious water!
Water is everywhere—in nature, industry, home, our bodies, products, interiors, buildings, landscapes, systems (just to name a few).
With up to one third of the global population living without reliable access to clean water, we need better design solutions that account for potable water, gray water, black water—its uses, re-uses, controls, management, efficiency, and conservation.
We call on your innovative design solutions at all scales and sizes—products, interiors, buildings, landscapes, communication systems, or anything else you’ve dreamed up—for handling this most precious and most threatened natural resource. The time for new thinking on water is now.
What's your solution?
Indeed, what will be your marvelous ideas?
Will you turn a city, say, Beijing (why not!), into the largest ecological wastewater treatment machine in the world?
How about a huge, thinly surfaced floating island that's both a post-oil power station and a park?
Or perhaps you'll summon the not-so-ancient spirit of Isamu Noguchi to help you design the greatest hydrological playground ever?
Will your design involve Grasscrete® or super absorbent polymers instead?
Could it be that you want to design an awesome set of cocktail glasses? And that in your poetically beautiful project statement, you will mention how water has always been considered the epitome of purity, a fundamental attribute of Paradise, and used to cleanse the soul of its sins, but it, too, can flood entire villages, terrify us with its abyss, and turn children cancerous with its impurities? You'll even say how very Treehuggable it is, because recycled hypodermic needles are used. No more shall they litter our beaches.
Will you ask yourself: What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?
Do you have an exceptional talent for programing and so will create a computer game to rival SimCity?
I can already tell that all the winners and runners-up will be phenomenally great. But in case yours isn't one of the projects chosen, send it to me and I'll post it here on Pruned. Sometimes the best aren't chosen.
