Photo by Frank Wojciechowski

An interdisciplinary team of Princeton University students have been awarded top honors, along with 14 other collegiate teams, for their ‘Power in a Box’ invention that converted a standard shipping container into a sustainable source of energy for remote or disaster-torn regions. The 18-month national competition, known as the “P3: People, Prosperity and the Plant Student Design Competition for Sustainability”, began in the fall of 2010 with 165 competitor and culminated April 21 and 22 on the Washington, D.C. Mall. The U.S. Environment Protection Agency has awarded the students with a $90,000 grant to further develop and implement their project.

Continue reading for more information on ‘Power in a Box’. read more »

Grimshaw / Gruen Via The Source

Metro officials have released six conceptual visions that suggest how the historic Los Angeles Union Station could be transformed by 2050. Preliminary “Vision Boards” were released in a public forum at Union Station last week, and although they are not part of the formal evaluation process, they have ignited an immense amount of public interest in the competition.

In an article posted on The Source, Los Angeles Mayor and Metro Board Chair Antonio Villaraigosa described that this competition is “about preparing for the future.” As plans for the California High-Speed Rail System evolve, it is imperative that Union Station is redeveloped to meet the standards of a 21st century transportation hub.

Continue after the break to view each Vision Board provided by the six well-known practices shortlisted for the competition. read more »

SOAG Building - Courtesy of SADAR + VUGA

SADAR + VUGA, in collaboration with LENS°ASS Architecten, has been selected as winner of an invited competition to design three new buildings on the Campus Schoonmeersen of the University College Ghent in Belgium. The campus development master plan will include a new building for the Study of Social Work (SOAG), a Sports Hall Extension and the Renovation of Building B that includes the adjoining Student Plaza. This highly anticipated project is expected to commence in late May. Continue after the break to learn more about each new facility.

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Photo by weirdox - http://www.flickr.com/photos/weirdox/

The Treehouses in Paradise competition, among many competitions featured on our site, unfortunately turned out to be a scam. Many architects not only lost their time, but their efforts and money as well. Many competitions arise such as these and unfortunately, the work of the architects are often gone to waste. Therefore, ArchDaily is requesting any proposals you may have so that we can conduct our own poll on our website. We are giving those who participated the opportunity to feature their proposals so our readers can vote on them, provide comments, feedback, etc. We don’t want to see all of the work invested get left behind without giving the credibility it deserves and honoring such efforts. If interested, you are encouraged to submit through our contact form.

Courtesy of Terreform ONE

Terreform ONE is now accepting submissions for the 2012 ONE Prize Competition: BLIGHT TO MIGHT. The competition is a call to put design in the service of disenfranchised communities, to reinvigorate deindustrialized and depressed urban areas, and to repurpose spaces for economic growth and job creation. Situated in the context of a struggling U.S. economy and the tension of stagnant unemployment, ONE Prize 2012 aims to explore the socially, economically, and ecologically regenerative possibilities of urban transformation and design. The competition is powered by the idea that social, ecological, and economic struggles can simultaneously be addressed through collaborative action and innovative planning. Deadlines for submissions is June 30. For more information, please visit their official website here.

Phase 1 Submission - Courtesy of OMA

In 2011, the Russian Federation Council confirmed that the city of Moscow will annex 150,000 hectares to the southwest in order to overcome its chronic space problems, making Moscow 2.4 times larger than its current size. The expansion is designed to relieve pressure on the over-populated, historic city center by redistributing the working places to the annexed part of the Moscow Oblast, thus addressing transport, ecological and social issues that result from high levels of commuting.

Before Moscow’s new administrative borders come into force this July, the Council invited 10 teams to develop the concept of the Moscow Agglomeration. OMA has been announced as winner of the competition’s first round that focused on a plan for the Moscow Agglomeration as a whole.

Continue reading for more on OMA’s Moscow City Agglomeration Development Concept. read more »

First Place / Joseph Wood; Courtesy of Civitas - Reimagining the Waterfront

CIVITAS, the organizer of the Reimagining the Waterfront, has announced the winners of the ideas competition for the design of the East River Esplanade between 60th and 125th in New York City bound by the East River to the East and the FDR Drive to the west.  Joseph Wood of New Jersey, USA;  Takuma Ono and Darina Zlateva of New York City, USA and Matteo Rossetti of Italy claimed first, second and third prize respectively.  The competition aspires to bring to new and fresh ideas to the conversation about this waterfront, which over the years has had many issues of disrepair.  Anyone who has attempted to bike down this path can appeal to just how unpleasant it can be – massive potholes that take up the whole path, traffic rushing by just a foot away just beyond a shoulder (which is not provided everywhere) and cobbled paths that create a bumpy ride.  The proximity to the East River, and the views of Randall’s Island, Queens, Roosevelt Island and the Queensboro Bridge are its saving grace.

There have already been many talks about the state of the East River Esplanade, particularly that it stops abruptly at East 53rd street at the foot of the Queensboro Bridge and starts up again around East 38th street.  Last summer MAS, an organization in NYC that advocates for intelligent urban planning, design and preservation, hosted a day-long charette to design an esplanade along the ConEd piers located between East 38th and East 41st Streets. MAS appealed to the community for ideas for “The Next Great NYC Waterfront” and worked alongside W Architecture and Landscape Architecture to produce a report, which can be found here.  With CIVITAS’s competition, the issues are again acknowledged to continue brainstorming the future of the waterfront.

The Architect’s Newspaper reviewed the competition winners in an article by Tom Stoelker, which are imaginative and considered.  The proposals of the winners and honorable mentions will be exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York between June 6th and September 2012 which will give the public access to some possibilities for the future of the East River Esplanade.

Join us after the break for more on the proposals. read more »

© West 8 urban design & landscape architecture

Rotterdam-based practice WEST 8, together with the local architects of IROJE, have been announced winner of the International Competition for Master Plan of Yongsan Park, Korea. The Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs of the Republic of Korea organized the competition with the intention to create a “national park in which nature, culture, history and the future come in harmony.” Located in a large area in the center of Seoul, the circa 243 ha site has been in use as a military base for an extensive period both during the Japanese occupation and under post-war American protection.

Continue reading for more information on the Yongsan Park competition.

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Courtesy of Building Trust international

With the support of Habitat for Humanity and the YMCA, Building Trust International seeks to find well designed homes for the elderly or homeless within some of the World’s richest countries though their ‘HOME’ competition. The growing rate in single occupancy households has led to increased numbers of young and elderly people affected by poverty being forced to live in substandard living conditions and in the worst cases sleeping rough. They are asking designers, engineers, architects and house builders to provide a solution to the housing crisis by offering sustainable, affordable small homes that give those that are alienated or marginalized within society a safe place to live. ask contestants to site their proposals in an urban area of a developed country, develop single occupant designs that are sensitive to the local context and keep to a budget of £20,000 ($30,000). Proposals are due no later than July 31. For more details on the competition and how to register, please visit here.

72 Hour Urban Action, the world’s first real-time architecture competition, gives selected teams only three days & three nights to design and build interventions in public space in response to local needs. The competition will be the kick-off of a series of major urban interventions around Stuttgart 21, site of the largest urban redevelopment in Europe and the center of a heated 30-year-old public debate. The competition is defined by an extreme deadline, a tight budget and limited space and will challenge participants to rapidly leave a lasting impact on the city’s urban fabric.

They will be battling the clock, the restrictive conditions and each other to dream and realize projects in response to the spatial and social challenges the sites and missions offer. The international teams will include residents, architects, designers, artists, craftspeople, students and generally nice people. Teams will come to Stuttgart armed with a passion for action, and ready to give their time and expertise to help with community needs. For more information, please visit here.

Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architect & Paul Murdoch Architects

The ten finalists competing in the final phase of the National Mall Design Competition are dreaming big. Proposals to restore the National Mall include flourishing lakeside gardens, contemporary cafés hovering over water, grassy new amphitheaters and underground pavilions exposed at the foot of the Washington Monument. Since the announcement of the finalists, the teams have been refining there proposals behind closed doors.

Now, the Trust for the National Mall has released the highly anticipated proposals to the public. From now until Sunday, at the Smithsonian Castle and the National Museum of American History, you can view each proposal in its entirety. If you don’t live in the D.C. area, no need to worry. Continue after the break to catch a glimpse of each submission and learn how you can help the jury decided who will revamp America’s “front yard”. read more »

Courtesy of West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA)

The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority (WKCDA) recently launched a design competition to deliver one of the first landmark buildings for the West Kowloon Cultural District, the Xiqu Center. The Chinese opera venue will provide a world-class facility for the preservation and development of the art form in Hong Kong and will be designed to host and produce the finest examples of Cantonese and other Chinese opera performances.The Xiqu Center, scheduled for completion around the end of 2015, will be the first of 17 core arts and cultural venues to be opened within the District and one of 15 proposed performing arts venues. The deadline for submissions in April 10, 2012. More information on the competition after the break.

Occupying a prime site at the eastern edge of the District on the corner of Canton Road and Austin Road West, the center will provide a gateway of access to the Cultural District. The competition covers the design of a 1,100-seat main theatre, a 400-seat small theatre, a Tea House for performances for audiences up to 200 and ancillary training and education facilities. Michael Lynch, Chief Executive Officer of WKCDA said, “The competition heralds a new phase of the West Kowloon Cultural District development. We are proceeding to a detailed design stage and I am looking forward to working with inspired creative teams on the realization of our ambitions for the Cultural District.”

“Following the fantastic response to the West Kowloon Bamboo Theatre performances at the start of the Year of Dragon, we know Chinese Opera has a special place in the heart of Hong Kong people. We want to find a design team that can deliver for Hong Kong a world-class home for Chinese Opera practitioners, students and audiences and a facility fitting for such an important form of Chinese cultural heritage”

For more detailed information, please visit their official website here.

Courtesy of Slant

The Slant Awards Spring 2012 competition, which is open to all, challenges participants to design a concept plan for a city sector which is undergoing urban renewal. The city in question is not a real city, it has been designed solely for this competition, and its location is not being specified. It is a generic city that could be almost anywhere in the world and participants are free to choose the country in which you would like this imaginary city to be located. This is a worldwide competition open to all those who have an interest in landscape design and urban planning, and students are especially encouraged to enter. The deadline for submissions is June 11, 2012. For more information, please visit their official website here.

Courtesy of RE:site + Metalab

Memory Cloud is the winning commission awarded to RE:site (Norman Lee and Shane Allbritton, Artists website: www.resitestudio.com) and METALAB (Andrew Vrana, Joe Meppelink and Michael Gonzales, Architecture + Fabrication) by Texas A&M University for the new Memorial Student Center 12th Man Hall. Through a competition and short-list interview process the team demonstrated the ability to harness the potential of programmable LEDs, remote sensing, parametric design and digital fabrication to create an open ended narrative of the story of the University through animated silhouette imagery of past and real-time present student life on the campus.

Memory Cloud will be installed in December of 2012. Continue after the break for more images, video and the designer’s project description.

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Courtesy of Skanska

The Skanska: Bridging Prague International Design Competition, announced by reSITE Festival, ARCHIP (Architectural Institute in Prague) and Skanska, seeks to find new conceptions and proposals for the River Vltava, in Prague, Czech Republic. The scope of the competition is the Vltava riverbank and its immediate context from Libensky Most (Bridge) to the north to Zeleznicni most (Railway Bridge) to the south. This section of the river has really various character and quality on both riverbanks, which gives competitors a chance to select and work on a wide scope of places and areas. The proposals should use existing potential of the Vltava river, define its connection with the city – and lead to creation of attractive public spaces of adequate scale, living by a variety of activities. More information on the competition after the break. read more »

Courtesy of EME3

EME3 is currently seeking projects for their 7th edition of eme3 Festival that will be held in Barcelona from June 28th to July 1st 2012 in COAC (Official Catalan Chamber of Architects) while the exposition will remain open until July 15th. The theme starts from an exploratory analysis of the application of the concept “BOTTOM-UP” in architecture and its relationship with society. In a changing environment like the current, where the foundations of our system are constantly questioned and challenged, a series of actions, which to date had a fairly minor implementation in developed societies, emerge now strongly, relying on creativity and innovation to fight this moment of crisis and uncertainty. The deadline for submissions is April 15th. More information on the competition after the break. read more »

Courtesy of CTBUH

Nominations are now being accepted for the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s (CTBUH) 11th Annual Awards program. They are asking all interested candidates to submit your tall building projects for consideration for one of the Council’s Best Tall Building awards, and have your projects profiled in the Annual Awards Book and promoted around the world. In addition to the regional Best Tall Building Awards, the Council announces two new awards this year: the Performance award and the Innovation award. Deadline for receipt of nominations is April 30, 2012, at which time the Awards Committee will deliberate and choose the winners. More information after the break. read more »

'Migrating Landscapes'

Winners of the National Exhibition of Migrating Landscapes have been announced! This nation-wide, open ideas competition is the main process for creating Canada’s official entry to the 2012 Venice Biennale in Architecture, entitled Migrating Landscapes. Themed around migration and cultural identity, entrants comprised of young Canadian architects and designers, ages 45 and under, where invited to reflect on their migration experiences and cultural memories, and design dwellings onto a new landscape that would be showcased through a series of seven regional exhibitions across the country. Together with the Winnipeg-based Migrating Landscapes Organizer (MLO), the jury has selected 18 winners out of 26 finalists to represent ‘Team Canada”. Continue after the break to review the winning competitors.

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Courtesy of TEX-FAB

TEX-FAB Digital Fabrication Alliance is seeking research proposals that actively connect academia, the profession and the fabrication industry in the Continuing Research category and in the Speculative Proposal category new start-up projects. As this is a “design to fabricate” competition, TEX-FAB will match the network of fabricators and consultants with the projects that best manifest research through computational fabrication and apply it toward more intelligent integers of materiality and construction. Submissions are due no later than June 2nd. More information on the competition can be found here.

SHoP Architects

Downtown Houston has exploded over the past few years with development targeted specifically toward attracting citizens into its downtown center beyond work hours.  Some of these efforts have been a huge success; others have yet to justify themselves.  But none so far have reached the architectural caliber that Houston’s latest competition has.  The current light rail system in Houston is looking to expand rapidly in the near future to keep up with growing downtown attractions, most notably of which being the new and much anticipated Houston Dynamo Stadium by Populous.

The original scheme called for two new separate stations on Main Street – one at the 600 block, and one at the 800 block.  The resolution was then made to create a larger, combined light rail hub in between the two at the 700 block of Main Street, and hold a competition led by Dean Patricia Oliver of the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Dean Sarah Whiting of the Rice University School of Architecture.  A short list was created composed of internationally renowned architecture firms, and the competition winner is to be announced in the upcoming weeks.  More to come once the finalist is announced.

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