Awarded Competitions: The Latest Architecture and News

KAAN Architecten has won the commission to design the New Amsterdam Courthouse. The new building will replace the current judicial complex at the intersection of Zuidas and Parnassusweg, which is slated for demolition. The Courthouse of Amsterdam is the largest in the Netherlands and handles 150,000 cases a year with a staff of 200 judges and 800 professionals. KAAN Architecten describes the building's design as both "stately" and "distinguished," stating that the intention was to create a facility that understands justice as an open process, and thus incorporates ways for the public to engage with the Courthouse.

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Napur Architect has won the competition to design a new building for the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest. On a site bordering Ötvenhatosok Square and adjacent to City Park, the building is one part of the Liget Budapest Project, aimed at renewing the civic space of the area with renovations to existing structures, rejuvenation of green spaces, and institutional additions. Besides the Ethnography Museum, City Park will be home to the House of Hungarian Music designed by Sou Fujimoto and a New National Gallery designed by SANAA.

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Agence Ter and Team have been announced as the winners of a proposal to redesign the oldest park in Los Angeles, Pershing Square, with a call for “radical flatness.” Opened in 1866, with subsequent name changes and redesigns, the winning proposal will replace the most recent iteration by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta and landscape architect Laurie Olin, which opened in 1994. Pershing Square is a five-acre park bounded by 5th Street to the north, 6th Street to the south, Hill Street to the east, and Olive Street to the west, in the heart of Downtown Los Angeles. The path to redevelopment began in September 2015, when the Los Angeles City Council adopted the plans of councilmember José Huizar, to create a public-private partnership and work with Pershing Square Renew, a non-profit partner, which came out of a task force created by Huizar in 2013.

International architecture competition organizers Bee Breeders have announced the three winners and honourable mentions of their competition to design a Charlie Hebdo Portable Pavilion. Intended to be a travelling exhibition of the work of the French Magazine “Charlie Hebdo,” participants were asked to “support and promote” principles of free speech in their design. Responding to the terror attacks against Charlie Hebdo and the ensuing global discourse on free speech, the competition sought to deconstruct the “conventional assumptions of free speech,” and look specifically at “what makes speech free and how much of it comes at a cost.”

Entries were judged for the way they challenged these assumptions in terms of space, material and form. Preference was given to projects that had clear concepts, circulation, sequence and narrative, in addition to public engagement and a “reconciliation between the abstract and theoretical with the physical and real.” Consideration was also given to the way projects contributed to a discourse – rather than expressing an opposition - concerning the growing grey areas between "ideological, political, and cultural binaries." 

Manuelle Gautrand Architecture, DesignInc, and Lacoste + Stevenson have won an international competition for the design of a civic and community building in the Australian city of Parramatta. The six-story, 12,000 square meter building, a mixture of rectilinear sharpness and parabolic curves, extends back from the city’s Victorian Free Classical style town hall. The new structure will include a variety of spaces, including: council chambers and offices, a library, public roof gardens, a customer care center and visitor experience center, community meeting rooms, a technology hub, and an innovation space.

Prolific organizers of architecture competitions, Bee Breeders has revealed the winners of their latest challenge: repurposing a brutalist department store in Bangkok into an artists’ retreat. Competitors were expected to not only renovate the building, but also to engage the public in the surrounding city with the arts, as well as to “reflect on both the history and future” of the site. The program was loosely defined and open to interpretation, with entries evaluated primarily on the strength and clarity of their concept, originality, presentation quality, relevance to context and its possible presence as a strong community for artists in Bangkok. See all of the winners after the break.

The team of Peter Bus, Tomas Vlasak, Vaclav Petrus, and Petr Bouril has received an honorable mention for their proposal for the Tokyo Pop Lab Competition, which recently announced its winners. The proposal, entitled "At The Crossroads of Ideas," is designed as a “three-dimensional representation of history and development of pop culture.”

Separated into three parts, one below ground, one above ground, and one in-between, the design is interconnected via cylindrical concrete towers, which act as the main structural support of the building.

The winners of the latest Combo Competitions challenge, Prison Puzzle, have been announced. Based on the idea of utilizing architecture to reduce recidivism—the large number of criminals that relapse into crime and back behind bars—Prison Puzzle sought out proposals for the design of a medium-security prison with a capacity of 500 inmates. The design was to be sited in Arizona, in the United States, where the number of inmates per resident is high above the national average. Each design had to include elemental components like cells, exercise yards, and visiting rooms, and participants were encouraged to explore "how architecture can help in shaping environments that influence behaviors."

A competition now in its 11th year, eVolo Magazine has announced the winners of its 2016 Skyscraper Competition: a group of three top prizes and 21 honorable mentions culled from 489 entries. The award annually recognizes the vanguard of high-rise construction "through [the] novel use of technology, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations." Among this year's winners are a project that proposes digging down and creating a megastructure along the perimeter of Central Park, a skyscraper that acts as a hub for drones in future commercial applications, and a tower that takes advantage of the climate of Iceland as an ideal location for data servers.

UNStudio has won a competition to transform the former Deutsche Bank site in Frankfurt's financial district into a lively mixed-use site comprised of offices, apartments, hotels, retail, gastro and open public spaces. With four high-rise towers reaching up to 228-meters-tall, the proposal plans to feature the city's highest residential and office buildings.

“Bringing a mixed-use project into this financial district will not only enliven the area during daytime, but it will also introduce evening programs and create an essential form of social sustainability to this part of the city," says Ben van Berkel of UNStudio. "The introduction of the residential and the leisure components are key to this strategy. This sculptural family of towers will also create the suggestion of a cohesive neighborhood within the skyline and emphasize the importance of this part of the city within the whole."

English Heritage has announced that a team of Ney & Partners and UK-based William Matthews Associates has won the Tintagel Castle Bridge Design Competition. Chosen from a shortlist of 6 proposals, from among 136 entries, the winning design was selected by the majority of the jury.

The site of Tintagel Castle is one of English Heritage’s most spectacular, attracting over 200,000 visitors annually. It is “inextricably linked to the legend of King Arthur and has been prized throughout history for its elemental qualities and spirit of place within this area of outstanding natural beauty.” The new bridge is commissioned for approximately £4 million and will stand 28m higher than the current crossing.

Blank Space has announced three winners and ten honorable mentions in their third Fairy Tales Competition. This year's contest drew entries from more than 1,500 participants from 67 countries. Everyone from students to academics and notable studios and designers submitted detailed stories and beautiful visuals for their submissions. The winners were chosen by an interdisciplinary jury of distinguished judges including Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentine Galleries; Elizabeth Diller, founding partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and ArchDaily’s own Becky Quintal, Executive Editor; and David Basulto, Founder and Editor in Chief.

The student architecture competition “120 Hours” has released the winners of its 2016 competition—“What Ever Happened to Architectural Space?”—which this year challenged entrants to imagine a space without program or site. In a time when the discourse of architecture is influenced more by program and environment than spatial quality, the brief was uniquely challenging in its simplicity. Entries were received from over 2863 students from 72 countries, with winners selected by a jury headed by Christian Kerez and including Maria Shéhérazade Giudici, Beate Hølmebakk, Neven Mikac Fuchs and Marina Montresor.

Originally devised by students in Oslo, the competition format is intended as a way of encouraging discourse among architecture students across the world, with competition briefs released just 120 hours (5 days) before the submission deadline. These unique restrictions have fostered a reputation for unconventional and challenging proposals and winning entries in the past have included giant scaffolds of hammocks and the use of robots to inhabit an abandoned town. Read on to see the top three award recipients for 2016.

Steven Holl Architects has been selected as the winner of an invited competition to design the Rubenstein Commons at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) located in Princeton, New Jersey. The new Rubenstein Commons will be situated at the center of the campus and serve as a new forum for scholars to interact and share ideas. The IAS, which was home to where Albert Einstein worked for 22 years until his death in 1955, received the project funding from David Rubenstein, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of the Carlyle Group.

SADAR+VUGA, HHF architekten, and local consultant Archicon have received first prize in the competition for the adaptation and reconstruction of the Dom Revolucije (Home of Revolution) in Nikšić, Montenegro.

The existing structure, built by Slovenian architect Marko Mušič, was originally intended to represent the socio-political structure of Nikšić, Montenegro and Yugoslavia as a whole. Construction began on the building in 1978, and after eleven years, work was suspended, leaving the site uncompleted in the middle of the city for 27 years.

The new proposal will transform the Home of Revolution by utilizing the existing built structure—mainly a shell—and inserting minimal interventions to create a new type of urban space.

The three winners of the Tokyo Pop Lab competition, which called for the development of an institution for popular culture, have been announced.

Centered on the phenomena of pop culture, the competition examined how “popular culture migrates and changes from person to person and place to place,” and invited entrants “to critically evaluate fundamental correlations between cultural production and architecture.”

Entrants varied in typology from pragmatic to ideological, with successful proposals including “a well considered and articulated definition of popular culture, clarity in representation of both architecture and culture, and a clear programmatic agenda.”

The three winners of the Tokyo Pop Lab competition are:

AL_A has won a competition to design a new mosque within the Foster + Partner-designed World Trade Center complex in Abu Dhabi. The 2000-square-meter project, envisioned as a "pathway to serenity" rather than a single building, leads visitors on a journey through an informal park of palm trees that slowly align with the mosque's shifted grid as users approach the Prayer Hall. Once inside, visitors are facing towards Mecca.

"The mosque is envisaged as a piece of the city, one that reflects the journey from the temporal to the spiritual," said AL_A director Ho-Yin Ng. "The mosque and the garden become one, with the trees and the columns forming an informal vertical landscape and allowing Friday prayers to spill outside."

Mecanoo architecten and MAYU architects+ have won a competition to design the new Tainan Public Library in Taiwan. Their winning design "represents the meeting of cultures, generations and histories," says the architects. It will feature an inverted stepped facade that houses reading rooms, special collections, study spaces, a children’s area, café, conference hall, a 200-seat auditorium, and public courtyards.

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