Competitions: The Latest Architecture and News

The City of Rotterdam held a competition for a mixed-use extension for the City Hall, accommodating public and administrative facilities and a residential program. The competition requests that the mixed-use building becomes “the most sustainable in the Netherlands”.

Five designs were presented by the City, and they will be on public display at the NAI until Sept 13th to receive public feedback, which can also be made through the website. The teams will present to the jury on Septh 23th, and the winner will be announced sometime in October.

The 5 finalists are: Claus en Kaan Architecten, Mecanoo Architecten, Meyer en van Schooten Architecten, OMA and SeARCH.

OMA shared with us their finalist entry, in collaboration with ABT and Werner Sobek Green Technolgies. The project adheres to the highest energy efficiency requirements, and it also considers a sustainable approach in terms of speed of construction and future flexibility of the building through a repeated and flexible structural system.

Images from the other proposals will be featured on another article. Rem Koolhaas’ statement and more images after the break.

Exploration of housing typologies reveals vast the potential of overlaying urban, contextual, cultural, social, and life cycle flows toward determining new architectonic strategies for the future. The d3 Housing Tomorrow Competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.

Chicago Architecture Today announced two competitions currently initiated and concluding in April 2010. The first is student-based Mock Firms International Skyscraper Challenge which focuses on a studio brief for Mexico City. More details here.

The design team of L. Tuleikis, R. Antinis, K. Vaikšnoras, K. Lanauskas, and P. Vaitiekūnas shared their competition entry for the renovation of Lukishkiu Square in Vilnius, Lithuania. The competition highlighted “freedom” as the square was established for a memorial space. The team’s proposal consists of a gently carved out central Freedom Field, surrounded by sculptural compositions and an external flame along the perimeter of the site.

More about the entry after the break.

The Steel Structures Education Foundation organized a competition designed for students to fuse their conceptual ideas with the reality of physical structure. With the program and scale left to the discretion of the designer, the proposal had to emphasize the “essential relationship” between the exploration of form and material, with regards to surfaces, members and connections. As an academic project, students also had to use their details to communicate with the steel fabrication industry as a way to expose ”the opportunities and restraints inherent in realizing conceptual design.” “It is important for students of architecture to grasp the fact that structural design lies not just in the realm of the engineer, but can be a means for architects of arriving at a meaningful realization of architectural ideas,” explained the SSEF. The winner, student Matt Schmid from the University of Waterloo, designed a bird sanctuary in Niagara Gorge in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.

More about the winning entry after the break.

Morphosis just shared with us their proposal for the Four Towers in One Competition. The competition (which Steven Holl Architects ultimately won) asked participants to design an office tower complex for the new Shenzhen Stock Exchange Headquarters in the Futian commercial business district. The area was in need of a unified urban plan that would include the Headquarters for the new office towers of Shenzhen Media Group, China Construction Bank, China Insurance Group, and Southern & Bosera Funds. For Morphosis’ proposal, rather than creating various disconnected vertical skyscrapers, the project aims to create one “cohesive, interwoven district.” By conceiving the sites as 3-dimensional envelopes rather than flat 2-dimensional footprints, the buildings can be interwoven to “facilitate a network of interlocking forms reminiscent of the venerated Chinese puzzle.”

More images and further project description after the break.

Visiondivison shared their entry for the Koivusaari Idea Competition to create a new city district on an island just outside Helsinki, Finland. The competition asked participants to organize a master plan for the island that would provide the framework for further planning. Visiondivison’s proposal, Urban Fade, is comprised of a highly efficient city grid that allows users the option of moving around the district to interact with the different areas.

More about the proposal after the break.

BAA is looking to appoint a team to produce a ‘comprehensive masterplan to examine the potential expansion of Heathrow Airport’ – including a third runway and a new sixth terminal.

The editors at suckerPUNCH are sponsoring an open international design competition. Perfectly situated but notoriously maligned, the Gowanus Canal borders the vibrant Brooklyn neighborhoods of Red Hook, Park Slope, and Carroll Gardens. As a result of heavy industrial pollution, the canal took on an iridescent purple sheen gaining it the nickname “Lavender Lake.”

Greeen! Architects shared their competition proposal for a new library and office building for the University Duisburg-Essen, in Germany. The young architectural practice specifically focuses on ecological and sustainable design approaches. For their proposal, a large ecological complex intends to “create a place where city and university are woven together.”

More about the proposal after the break.

After several years of organizing the annual Skyscraper Competition it has become a renowned architectural prize around the world. The best projects of each competition are widely published from architecture, design, and fashion publications to technology, business, and entertainment magazines. The winning projects are also featured in websites, television documentaries, and galleries.

Architect’s description and more images after the break.

This year we not only celebrate the 142nd birthday of Frank Lloyd Wright, but also the 50 years of the Guggenheim, one of his master pieces (completed the year he passed away). These dates are not only commemorated with Lego Kits and exhibitions, but also with a very interesting competition held by the Guggenheim Museum and Google Sketchup.

Postscript

With the recent negative feedback on some websites about the winning entry and the initiative of Bustler to publish all non-winners, we have shockingly realized, that we have not been the only ones, who have been Dubai-tized. Even as we started the project, the boundaries of cynicism, architectural integrity and the potential of just doing anything have been extremely blurred by the word alone – Dubai. Given those parameters, we went down a road, which lies on the verge of our own office integrity and agenda and the insanity of an architect’s wet dream. Not that we want to start a discussion about ethics in architecture, but it seems that all of us are responsible for the direction architecture took. Please find here our last project in that direction.

Architect’s description and more images, after the break.

The six selected practices after the break.

A few months ago, the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University organized an open international design ideas competition. The competition, Imagining Recovery, which coincided with Obama’s first 100 days of presidency, asked participants to imagine what recovery could look like and supplement the maps, charts and graphs of Recovery.gov with images of lived experiences, as announced earlier on AD.

Submissions were received from 25 different countries and on May 13, the distinguished jury selected ten projects for recognition and of these, only three to be the prize winners.

Project winners after the break.

The Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, in association with the University’s Property and Campus Services department, is seeking to appoint an architect or architectural team to design a new building for the Faculty, to be located on the Melbourne University Parkville Campus. The process of appointment will be via a limited competition to be held in 2009. Architects and architectural teams who wish to be considered for selection into the competition are invited to submit an expression of interest.

Los Angeles is often portrayed as the example of the car-friendly city. The traditional image of the town is an endless pattern of single family dwellings, interconnected by traffic-clogged freeways, where transit is undeveloped and the air is choked with smog.

However, Los Angeles is changing. The city’s Transport Authority has planned in the last years a series of measures aiming to improve quality of life through improving transit and walking and providing alternative to car commuting.