The Bespoke* Access Awards 2016 is an international design competition, which seeks original ideas to improve access and provide an enhanced experience for hotel guests, particularly for those with disabilities. Peers in the UK House of Lords initiated the competition. It aims to employ good design to re-imagine the welcome that hotels extend to guests with physical disabilities and learning difficulties, with the aim of making the hotel experience more joyful and inclusive. The scope of the competition is wide-ranging. It seeks to reward the most creative and original ideas in architecture, interior design, product design and service design. Ideas could address the experience from the front door to any room or service within a hotel, and the process that has to be undertaken before a visitor arrives or at check out. The competition is international and open to everybody. Individuals, groups and design professionals of any age are all eligible. The competition organisers welcome particularly entries from designers and architects with disabilities. Entrants should demonstrate that they have engaged with ‘service users’, including disabled people, in framing their proposals. Entries will be assessed anonymously. A prize fund of £30,000 will be available at the judges’ discretion. An overall winner (if one should be selected) will be awarded the Celia Thomas Prize**, worth £20,000. Other prizes may be offered at the discretion of the judges.
Concordia University’s CoLLaboratoire invites young creative practitioners, be they students or recent graduates, to consider the role of public art and design in increasing awareness of, and engagement in, issues around climate change at the local level. This design competition is part of a series of activities conducted by the Montreal-based not-for-profit CoLLaboratoire initiative, whose main objective is the realization of a series of art-based interactive installations that address some critical theme of sustainable living in the city.
If we are to prevent catastrophic global warming, buildings need to perform better. BSRIA and Designing Buildings Wiki are running an ideas competition to improve the performance of buildings in use. The competition is very simple to enter. You don’t need to write an essay, we are just looking for ideas, which might only take a paragraph, or even a sentence to explain. The more innovative and far-reaching the idea the better.
How To Architecture! is a design competition which invites students to reflect on contemporary culture and to do it with architecture. Leafing through headlines, lists, captions, zooming in and out of feeds, bold fonts, and articles made of images: we participate in the age of the listicle. Culture flashes before us—an extension of ourselves: the superabundant reel. As the cycle of consumption whirs on, architecture still stands. What does architecture say; how does it feed you? Tell us what you think! Tell us How To Architecture!
The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 70th Annual International Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, June 7–11. Please submit an abstract no later than June 6, 2016, to one of the 32 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks or the open sessions. The thematic sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations.
1. INTRODUCTION “The Obama Presidential Center will bring to life the vision and legacy of President Obama, including inspiring an ethic of citizenship, expanding opportunity in a global age, and promoting peace, justice, and dignity throughout the world.” (Source: Obama Foundation)
This competition challenges designers to create an exceptional presidential library for U.S. President Obama (OPL). We look for design proposals with wide reaching architectural interventions that deal with the challenging South Side of Chicago, and make a case for a sustainable urban and economic growth. There are currently two potential site locations – one on the east side and the other on the west side of the University of Chicago (see p1.jpg): The Washington Park site and Jackson Park site. You are asked to make a choice between the two sites. There were numerous alter-native site proposals, e.g. sites in New York, Hawaii, Chicago etc. The Obama Foundation has identified these two properties as the ones with the most potential, based on key assumptions, opportunities and limitations relative to their contexts.
Qatar Museums has announced a shortlist of eight finalists that will move on to the third and final stage of the Art Mill International Design Competition in Doha. On a site extending into the Arabian Sea that was only recently occupied by Qatar Flour Mills, Art Mill will integrate gallery and exhibition space with facilities for education, events, conservation, art handling, and research. Joining the Museum of Islamic Art designed by I.M. Pei, and the still under-construction National Museum of Qatar, designed by Jean Nouvel, in the words of the competition brief, “Art Mill will and extend and intensify the cultural quarter being developed in Doha.”
Hou de Sousa (Nancy Hou and Josh de Sousa) have recently won two competitions for temporary installations in Washington DC and New York, both using salvaged materials. The first, Raise/Raze, is the winning proposal for DC’s Dupont Underground, an abandoned trolley station repurposed as a contemporary arts and culture space. The project reuses the balls from Snarkitecture’s “The Beach” installation at the National Building Museum for a new environment-generating initiative, which opens on April 30.
As winners of the 2016 Folly Competition held by the Architectural League of New York, Hou de Sousa will also soon build a pavilion in Socrates Sculpture Park, in Queens. A simple wooden canopy, the structure is a multi-purpose space made of standard dimensional lumber, but has been accentuated with shingles of scrap wood found on-site. Known as Sticks, the pavilion will open to the public on July 9.
matterbetter.com has initiated an international open ideas competition for architecture students and young architects to research new housing concepts for the future of post-war Syria. The civil war in Syrian Arab Republic, which started in 2011, has created the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. According to UNHCR, over 4,300,000 people have left the country and fled to Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and now Europe. While world leaders are looking for an international solution to the Syrian civil war and refugee crisis, many Syrians are looking forward to the opportunity to come back home as soon as the war is over.
This is a competition to design an entrance gate for Järfälla’s Public Park. The competition is aimed at young designers from the fields of architecture, design and social media.
Edmonton’s Infill Design Competition is an opportunity to encourage productive conversations about infill and help the public and development community understand what’s possible for infill design. The competition should demonstrate that infill can augment, rather than detract from the character of our established neighbourhoods. The City of Edmonton is excited to promote and celebrate innovation, context sensitive design, and advance the design ethic for infill development in Edmonton.
The Lisbon Architecture Triennale is delighted to announce the opening call for Lisbon Triennale Millennium bcp Début Award, framed in the context of its 4th edition – The Form of Form. Targeted at international emerging architects, the Début Award boosts the recognition of young professionals or recently established practices. This distinction awards outstanding work, critical ideas, and encourages their career with a monetary prize.
Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your design ideas and win cash prizes!
Design Capital 21 is an interior design competition for a new integrated mall. The integrated mall intends to adopt as its conceptual design this theme: the world’s famous capital cities from the five continents. Each floor must be representative of the continent by bringing to life the characteristics and identities of its capital cities.
Collective Habitat is a competition for students and professionals which seeks to produce ideas to densify areas in or near the centers of 5 Chilean cities with collective housing. The goal is collect innovative architecture proposals that offer access to housing for middle and lower class families in well-served urban areas of Iquique, Valparaíso, Santiago, Concepción and Puerto Montt.
FM8 is concerned with the meaning of architecture and the city. The dinosaurs of capitalism have become the senescence of urbanism. If the modernist project of carte blanche is over, how do we engage the city’s filthy state without a clean slate?
Contemporary architectural discourse has sidelined the master plan. What if instead of a master-planning master architect, we assume the role of a jester-planning joker architect?
eVolo Magazine is pleased to invite designers around the world to participate in the 2016 VMODERN Furniture Design Competition. The award was born from the desire to create a forum for the discussion, debate and development of innovative design. Our goal is to discover and promote the most creative pieces of furniture that will transform the way we live and interact with our environment. What is the future of furniture design?
The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) is pleased to announce its 5th International Student Tall Building Design Competition. The goal of the competition is to shed new light on the meaning and value of tall buildings in modern society.
Location: The Xuanxi North project is located in central Beijing, within the second ring-road. It lies on the west side of Xuanwumenwai Avenue, about 2.2km in a direct line from Tiananmen Square and 3.6km from The Temple of Heaven, and has a surface area of about 13hectares. The project falls within the Beijing Historic Character Harmonization Area, and its borders are as follows: to the east it is bordered by Xuanwumenwai Avenue; to the west it is bordered by Shunhe 3 Lane(Xiaxie Street); to the south it is bordered by Chukuying hutong, Jiaochang Daliu Alley, and the south edge of Yang Jiaoshan Memorial Hall; to the north it is bordered by the single-storey area of Xuanwumen West Avenue. The area has within it 5 conservation sites (the Yang Jiaoshan Memorial Hall, which is a conservation site of Beijing City status, the Former Residence of Shen Jiaben, a site of District status, and the Former Residence of Gong Zizhen, and the Taiyuan and Dongguan Guildhalls, which are Cultural Relics Survey sites), and also 4 Simple Buildings, the rest being a warren of residential properties.
In the long term, the South Bohemian Philharmonic Orchestra has had to deal with the fact that it does not have a concert hall that would suit the acoustic and social requirements of a philharmonic orchestra. Although a project named Rejnok (Ray Fish) was created in 2008 by the world-famous architect Jan Kaplický, it was never built due to its high price of 2 billion CZK and also to operation costs that were expected to be rather high. In addition to testing modular technology possibilities, the idea competition should also try to find out what a new concert hall of a county town could look like and to reopen discussion on this cultural institution in České Budějovice.
The theatre was built in 1966-67. Now it is an abandoned municipal building. The theatre needs to be reconstructed/rebuilt taking into account current needs of the Cherkasy community. In summer 2015 our local volunteers team voiced the intention for revitalising Sylvan theatre and started a fundraising campaign. Thanks to the city community we have accumulated funds which will be the prize for this competition winner. We also polled participants of the fundraising campaign to discover their preferences for ways of the money application and for the concept of the future theatre. So Cherkasy citizens vote for the architecture projects competition. Requirements for projects are also based on the poll results.
Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, Photo Credit: Stacey Bryant
MCASB invites proposals for a large-scale, outdoor, traveling pavilion to be built and installed at each site of its new public art program, TakePart/MakeArt. As a central feature of TakePart/MakeArt, the mobile pavilion will be a bold and vibrant beacon for MCASB as it travels through three different communities across Santa Barbara County: Isla Vista, the Westside, and the Waterfront.
A “Pavilion” is a space defined specifically for a non-specific purpose. The specificity is the location and non-specificity is its use. A “Pavilion” is also a prototype of tech-crafted tradition and represents a geo-cultural transformation throughout all cultures.
First International Conference on Urban Physics, Quito - Galápagos, 25 September - 2 October 2016
The First International Conference on Urban Physics aims to be a founding event for the numerical simulation of cities and megacities, which are facing worldwide critical problems, such as their dual participation - as victims and actors - to the present and upcoming climate changes. The conference will provide an opportunity for scientists from different disciplines (computer graphics, environmental physics, numerical models, renewable energies, urban planning ...) to confront their ideas and methods for the detection and analysis of physical quantities, in order to better manage the development of cities and to meet economic and environmental constraints.
