3rd Advanced Architecture Contest, The Self-Sufficient City
The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and HP are pleased to announce the 3rd Advanced Architecture Contest, on the theme of THE SELF-SUFFICIENT CITY: Envisioning the habitat of the future.
The aim of the competition is to promote online discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.
The competition is open to architects, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing a proposal capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information technology, socialization and globalization, with a view to enhancing the connected self-sufficiency of our cities.
The competition prizes will consist of three scholarships for the IaaC Masters in Advanced Architecture for academic year 2010-11, cash prizes, and the latest generation of large-format HP printers. The selected projects will go on show in a major exhibition, due to open in Barcelona in May 2010, which will then travel to key cities around the world. The best projects will also be featured in a book to be published by Actar. The project is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Housing, the Generalitat de Catalunya, Barcelona City Council, and the publishing house Actar.
For more information on submission, calendar, rules and registration go to the official website.
Does anyone else feel like these call to arm competitions promote kitsch architecture moreso than providing a viable approach to design. It’s great to use words like ‘the future’, ‘sustainability’, and so on but these are part of architecture not a lone subject. These things should always be a part of architecture but they’re not its sole proprietor nor should the be considered as such.
And ‘architecture’ exists in a larger context than itself alone. In my opinion, when you doggedly stick to the languages and typologies of self-referential architectural typologies you’re much more likely to generate kitsch.
http://www.fashionarchitecturetaste.com/2007/07/ciac.html
Gosh, this must have touched a nerve, had to bring out the T word twice!
Here’s how that should have read:
… In my opinion, when you doggedly stick to the languages and typologies of self-referential architectural processes you’re much more likely to generate kitsch.
It’s been two months at least this competition was launched. About the theme, I start to be tired of green design-related competitions, and this title is just not good at all. “Envisionning the habitat of the future” sounds nice but doesn’t mean anything more than “thinking about how our habitat should evolve according to today’s and tomorrow’s problematics”. But there is always guys coming up with good ideas and I don’t see the link to kitsch architecture… Ron, Joshua, did you look at the results of the two firsts editions ? Ok some is only bad taste with green stuff on top, but not all…
I don’t even think sustainability is a prerequisite for an idea such as this. Once we forget the term, then we’ll truly be able to make architecture again. Right now there’s a frighteningly strange paradigm controlling architecture; the overuse of the computer and sustainable architecture. While these designs maybe be beautiful they’re not addressing root architectural developments of actual social concern, they’re following the trends of the time. Some may argue architecture is the zeitgeist, but at this particular time I think it would be beneficial for architecture to transcend this notion simply because there aren’t enough intellects left to keep the fragile balance of the majority and its causing architecture to take a very deformed route. Architecture should, at its core, address what the world actually needs to be focusing on. It’s a simplification of architecture to have competitions like this and it may not seem like its kitsch in its results but when you realize the foundation they’re built upon then you can disregard any other intents.
I’m not fond of all that sustainability trend, and I agree it is overused; somehow sustainability should be in every architectural piece as structure and aesthetic. No it’s not a prerequisite, it is a necessity, we may like it or not; as we make energy-efficient cars, we have to make energy-efficient buildings. No architect questions the fact we can’t remove the kitchen to make a nicer facade, so why questioning the fact we need to think about such things?
I think we should transcend the term used in the competition theme to ask ourselves: how can we make architecture out of sustainability? Somehow it is easy to forget about the notion, harder to turn it into architecture, and not into an architectural style…
“Once we forget the term, then we’ll truly be able to make architecture again.” Why? You can’t make architecture and sustainability in the same time? It is just another constraint, like site, regulations and clients’ needs.
I take this competition like an exercise, not simplification, like we would do at school, focusing on one aspect, one constraint or another… It is paper design, don’t take it too seriously.
The reason I said once we forget the term we can make real architecture is because it’s not a forefront issue of architecture. People have been building sustain-ably since the beginning of time. This isn’t a new concept, nor is it anything more than a passing trend if we continue to deem it as such. To try to dumb down architecture into a simple term like sustainable or self-sufficient is losing the aura of architecture as a more philosophical and enduring movement. I would almost consider these approaches as a bastardized form of architecture as much as the whole modular craze. Yes, these things are necessary but to boil architecture down to some sort of science is a misleading ideal to present to the youth of the profession, which is who I am representing.
I’m waiting to see the “real architecture” you’re talking about as well as the youth professionals you’re “representing”… There is no truth nor optimum in architecture, as you said, it is not a science… I’m also a young professional and and I know no one around me who believes sustainability is the new framework to build from.
Yes people built sustainably before, but nowadays your pavement stone and cladding come from China, your wooden floor from India and South America… This shouldn’t concern architectural design, but architects yes. And I hate, as you do, to see so many competitions focusing only on eco-design, but I invite you to read again the 3aac competition program. It is the first i know dealing with sustainability at the larger scale, and they ask interesting questions like “is it possible to have complex houses built with the same precision as a car?” or “can improvisation be more self-sufficient than total planning?”. Not so much about eco-design only.
And, moreover, and this is true for EVERY competition, paper or real design, no competition statement forces you to deal only with the topic without going further. Don’t like the term “self-sufficient”? Let’s remove it and share your design and ideas with others!
Self-sufficiency may be a trend, but architects always had to deal with and overcome trends. About science and architecture, if you look at greek temples, gothic churches or more recent history like Buckminster Fuller or Frei Otto, architecture always had to deal and play with science too.
The fact is I agree with you on most of what you say, but targeting this particular competition is probably not the best choice to support a discourse I would otherwise agree with.
I wasn’t using science in a literal term but in the concept that it can be given attributes and patterns that can be duplicated. Personally, titles are a very effective part of selling an idea especially with competitions. While I realize it’s a fairly shallow argument there is a lot to say about the title of a competition. Anyway, not to detract from the debate at hand but I will say there is also a problem with the idea of the precision of car statement simply because even when Le Corbusier was arguing for the scientific approach to architecture I felt it was just as amateur. The things we are discussing are bringing particularly new truths to the table because we are have a rather cyclical argument about the components of architecture which I would not dispute you with you when you say they deal with science, sustainability, and so on but I will argue the merits of limiting your ideas to these pretty mundane details. I would almost insist that the buildings of the future should more readily deal with ideas of digital space, personal space and its modification, and other ideas that are worth some investigation as to how people are beginning to use space in entirely new ways that architects have never dealt with. Again, I appreciate your persistence and your patience to debate my idealism of design.
That’s a very personal choice.
Competitions tend to deal with the questions we’re asked also as professionals. A couple of years ago it was disabled accessibility, and perhaps in a few years, indeed, digital space… The digital space theme is as much a trend for me as sustainability in architecture, no more, no less: generally it is a good opportunity for people to show their geeky, 3d-rendering-friendly proposals. Your other themes may be good ideas for other competitions, but why not how to deal with self-sufficiency in entirely new ways that architects have ever dealt with?
Perhaps do you reduce sustainability to an architectural integration of technical elements, “mundane details”, but it can modify architecture, space, facade…
Take the winner of the first edition, he made a house based on the fir cone pattern, opened during summer and closed during winter. Isn’t it architecture? Let’s just focus on the result, if it’s good, I don’t care about the title…
for you