Awarded Competitions: The Latest Architecture and News

Global sportswear brand Nike, in collaboration with urban planning consultants Strelka KB, has announced the winners of the competition to design a new Nike sports facility in Gorky Park, located at the heart of Moscow. The competition asked five of Russia’s leading young architecture studios – KOSMOS Architects, Rhizome, Novoe, Crosby Studios and Xора – to envision a “unique architectural object” that seamless integrates into the surrounding park environment, creating a landmark hub for sport and physical activity for Russia.

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Dutch architectural firm, Studio Komma, in collaboration with concept-developer The Men of Foam, have won the Lot 2 Urban Lab Challenge, with their proposal, ZIP2516. Located in The Hague, The Netherlands, in an upcoming living and working district, the project “seeks to create an iconic building that is an accelerator for the transformation of an industrial area into a new energetic urban district.”

ZIP2516 will house a variety of programs, including social and commercial entrepreneurship and public space. The ground floor of the building will accommodate the flagship store of social entrepreneur, Happy Tosti. The first floor of the building will feature a public square and “urban playground,” with office and start-up space on the floors above, and a “gin bar with roof terrace” on top.

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eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2017 Skyscraper Competition. Now in its 12th year, the annual award was established to recognize “visionary ideas for building [high-rise] projects that through [the] novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations, challenge the way we understand vertical architecture and its relationship with the natural and built environments.”

This year, 3 winners and 22 honorable mentions were selected from a pool of 444 entries. Among this year’s winners are a modular educational center and marketplace for sub-Saharan Africa, a vertical stack of factory and recreational space, villages embedded in mountains and even a skyscraper built within a giant sequoia.

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HENN and C.F. Møller Architects, of Berlin and Aarhus respectively, have jointly won an international competition to extend the iconic University Hospital RWTH Aachen in Germany. The winning entry, chosen amongst twelve others, responds to RWTH Aachen's existing listed 1970’s hospital with a partially-underground extension embedded in the landscape, seeking to minimize visual impact whilst creating lush green parkland for patients, staff, and the public.

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Architectural research initiative arch out loud has announced the winners of its DMZ Underground Bathhouse international open ideas competition. The brief challenged participants to create an underground bathhouse within the Korean Demilitarized Zone, responding to long-running geopolitical tensions between North and South Korea. Ultimately, nearly 300 proposals and 900 participants explored how architecture could position itself in the middle of these turbulent conditions, seeking out new forms of non-military architecture to improve relations between the two states.

The winning entries can be found below. Full results of the DMZ Underground Bathhouse Competition, including winners, honorable mentions and Director’s Choices can be found on the competition’s webpage here.

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Bee Breeders has released the results of their Blue Clay Country Spa competition, which asked participants to design a non-urban ecotourism facility in Latvia. The competition invited students and professionals to “interrogate the inherent tensions between subject and object, [and] building and site,” as well as to “engage the agency of typological form—including, for instance, the courtyard, shed, garden, and pavilion.”

The winners of the Blue Clay Country Spa competition are:

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Greek architecture firm topio7 has released image of their competition-winning proposal to create an eco-corridor across former lignite mines in the Western Macedonia region of Greece. Despite its past coal mining activity, the 180,000 Ha region has retained its natural beauty, partly due to the site's inaccessibility and fragmentation. Topio7’s winning proposal, through a measured, sensitive approach, seeks to enhance the area’s natural beauty whilst creating a variety of nodes and eco-corridors to enable public interaction.

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International student architecture competition 120 Hours has announced the winners of its 2017 competition, “The Way of the Buiy.” For this year’s edition of the challenge, which gives participants just 5 days from the announcement of the brief to its deadline to conceive a project, students were asked to design a 100-square-meter building housing a canteen and library for the LiangMeng school complex, located in the rural area of Puan City, China.

This year’s competition saw 3024 participants from 79 countries across the globe, with winners selected by a jury consisting of Jan Olav Jensen, Chiara Sala, Tran Kinh Manh, Angela Gigliotti, Fabio Gigone and Christian Hermansen Cordua. For the first time ever, the winning project will be constructed, after further development alongside the 120 Hours team. The building is expected to be completed by the end of 2017.

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BIVAK Architecture and Design has won a competition to design a rowing arena in Hungary for a host of championships taking place in the country in the coming years. The competition, hosted by the Hungarian Rowing Association (MKKSZ) and Hungarian Academy of Arts, was open to architects under 40 years of age. BIVAK’s winning proposal, announced in February 2017, centers on a 90-meter-long tower ‘gliding’ above the water.

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Architectural research initiative arch out loud, in partnership with Last House on Mulholland (LHOM), has released the winner of their competition to design a house of the future, to be sited directly below the Hollywood Sign.

Serving as a “design charette” to generate ideas about potential uses for the currently open site, the competition called for residential designs that demonstrate the use of innovative technology and integrative environmental strategies, while capitalizing on the prominence of the site.

The Hollywood competition received entries from 500 designers across the world, selecting three winners, with an additional owner’s choice.

The winners of the Hollywood design competition are:

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UNStudio has been selected as the winners of an international competition to design a new mixed-use development on the site of the former Deutsche Bank offices in Frankfurt, Germany. Selected to complete the urban strategy for the district last March, UNStudio has now been unanimously selected to carry out the architectural redevelopment of the site, beating out third prize proposals from the teams of Dudler / Jahn and MSW / Snøhetta, and an honorable mention from Christoph Mäckler / CoopHimmelblau.

The new mixed-use development will consist of four high-rise towers ascending from a multi-story plinth in the heart of the city. The project includes space for retail, restaurants and hotels, as well as a full range of residential accommodation. The four towers, rising up to 228 meters (748 feet) high, will serve as a new landmark on the Frankfurt skyline.

Eight “Winter Stations” have been installed along Toronto’s beachfront, injecting new life into the shoreline during the Canadian city’s winter months. Completed as a result of the annual Winter Stations design competition, the eight projects responded to this year’s theme of “Catalyst,” which sought installations that “open up the waterfront landscape and reinvent the space for visitors” while considering how materials may be repurposed or reused for future iterations.

Bee Breeders has announced the winners of its Archhive: Architecture in Virtual Reality competition, which asked participants to design a virtual exhibition gallery to showcase future Bee Breeders competition winners. In this virtual gallery, visitors would be able to “walk” around and explore the work of selected winners and guest contributors.

The three winners of Archhive: Architecture in Virtual Reality are:

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London-based firm Tonkin Liu has released images of its competition-winning Trade Centre in Zhengzhou, China. The Cradle Towers of Zhengzhou will comprise of five mixed-use towers swooping out of a ring-shaped podium. Inspired by the nearby Songshan mountainscape, the scheme aims to celebrate the city’s origins as it rockets into a high-tech future.

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The Toronto Winter Stations design competition has selected the five professional and three student teams that will add sculptures to the Toronto beachfront this winter for the third edition of the annual event. Under the theme of “Catalyst,” the jury sought installations that “open up the waterfront landscape and reinvent the space for visitors,” while considering how materials may be repurposed or reused for future iterations.

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Jungwoo Ji (of EUS+ Architects), Bosuk Hur (of Folio:), and Suk Lee (a fourth-year student at Iowa State University) have won the Liberty Museum / New York competition with their speculative design for a museum at the site of the Statue of Liberty National Monument in New York City.

Inspired by the concept of civil candlelight marches against social injustice in Korea—the designers’ home country—the proposal is designed to be an architectural device that reflects human rights and social justice disparity in real time. When visitors send messages, namely tweets, about dire events in their cities to the museum with their phones, each unit of the proposal receives electronic signals and changes its position to point towards the region in question.

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Following a second call for ideas from the Future Architecture Platform (MAO), a total of 337 ideas by 594 authors from 56 countries were submitted and distributed for public vote. 14,381 valid votes were logged by the organisation, and Assembling Narratives by Danai Toursoglou Papalexandridou (Greece) was chosen the favorite. She is one of a further 24 selected creatives who will be invited to participate at the Matchmaking Conference in late February at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) has named the winners of an international competition to redesign the city’s the Maharashtra Nature Park and the pedestrian/cyclist Bridge over the Mithi River. From 30 multi-discplinary teams from around the world, the expert jury selected a longlist of 8 teams, a 4-team shortlist, 2 finalists, and finally, an overall competition winner.

The winning team will now work with the MMRDA to develop their master plan to meet the environmental guidelines and construction regulations required to allow the project to be executed following approval from local authorities.