Designing for Adaptable Futures Winners Announced

The 2012 results for the DAF (Designing Adaptable Futures) International Student Design Competition are in! A joint first prize, a third prize and five honorable mentions were awarded among 150 submission from 26 countries. The competition asked students to present an architectural proposal that had a transformable quality that could make the physical or experiential space change over any given span of time. The prompt embraces what Adaptable Futures is about. The organization looks at the value of longevity in architecture through the adaptability of the built environment. It challenges notions of monumental architecture and architecture as a symbol of its time. It asks, instead to design with the context – the present – and its “temporal reality” – the changing and evolving future – in mind. After the break, take a look at the projects that were selected for best embodying the ability for architecture to adapt.

Joint First Prize: New Addington’s Village Green

Using Walter Segal’s concept of self-build, Village Green in New Addington is a proposal for a space “for the people, by the people” in which the collaborative processes within a community drive the construction of “transient social structure for high quality public space which evolve with community needs”.

Name(s): Jeffrey Adjei
University: University for the Creative Arts Canterbury
Country: England

Joint First Prize: Factory Home

Factory Home is designed for the many different functions of our everyday experiences: Live, Work and Play are blurred together in this proposed building organizaton.  Using the transformation of technology since the industrial revolution as inspiration, this architecture prepares us for the third industrial revolution – one that inspires cooperative living to share the costs of private enterprise.  Along with proposing a lifestyle, the project is a design for a building of three distinct zones that are spatially flexible so as to transition between “living” and “working” modules throughout the day as needed.

Name(s): Johnny Killok
University: University of Westminster
Country: England

Third Prize: Adaptable Street

Adaptable Street uses the existing infrastructure that every city has – streets.  The project proposes exploiting this space with myriad programmed uses by building them up to create “thick streets” with various layers and a mix of uses built in to different sections.  The extensive networks of our cities gives this project potential to transform linearly, seasonally and over time.

Name: Maxime Rousseau and Paul Jaquet
University: Université de Montréal/ Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nantes
Country: Canada/ France

Honorable Mention: Favela Flex

Favela Flex gives the power of place-making to the people who will inhabit those places.  The proposal offers a means of building up a favela for a variety of needs among residential and community uses.  With a single one-room module, people are invited to design, combine and recombine their homes for their own convenience.  Simple materials and a concrete slab and metal structure are the bones of each unit, which is fundamentally designed to provide the most flexibility for its construction.  The modules then fit into a grid that can be built into a landscape, like the favelas of Rio de Jinero, and can organically coalesce into different communities.

Name(s): Bruno Amadei, Camila Jardim, Mariana Correa and Renata Romanach
University: Fluminense Federal University
Country: Brazil

Honorable Mention: Designing for Sport

Designing for Sport takes the venue, such as the building constructed for the Commonweather Games in Glasgow, and transforms it into a multi-functional, energy-generating public space that can adapt programmatically over the course of a day as well as over years to provide the most dynamic experience for a neighborhood.

Name(s): David Weir-McCall
University: Robert Gordon Univeristy
Country: Scotland

Honorable Mention: How to Grow a City?

How to Grow a City is a response to the abandoned Gydnia shipyards and desire to regenerate this part of the city and its history through a self-organizing system that uses modules to adapt to different lifestyles and activities.  The proposal welcomes the repurposing and reuse of objects on the site, such as a rail tracks and cranes and opens this dialogue to a community workshop.  It welcomes the variables of age, function and social preference to create an evolving environment.

Name(s): Stanislaw Mlynski
University: University of Technology in Poznan
Country: Poland

Honorable Mention: Inside and Out of the Box

Inside and Out of the Box provides a DIY manual to transforming one’s home into an adaptable and sustainable element of the city.  Small, incremental changes that account for the innovative uses of conventional elements and the reuse of waste give users a way to customize and give longevity to their homes in a personal way. The steps are interchangeable allowing the user to mix and match as needed to transform one’s home over time. The tall, ‘tight’ units are designed for single person urban living conditions. ‘waste’ becomes ubiquitous getting reused by the owner or filtering into a larger trade network.

Name(s): Megan Jenkin
University: University of Cincinnati
Country: USA

Honorable Mention: Factory to Community Centre

Factory to Community Centre takes on the adaptable uses of the ubiquitous abandoned factories of previous decades.  The project explores what these spaces mean to different communities and neighborhoods and how this meaning changes over the course of a day, week  and year.

Name(s): Yuxin Cao
University: Dalian University of Technology
Country: China