competition: The Latest Architecture and News

The international design competition to create a new high-rise tower in central Auckland has announced five finalists. The five teams include Warren and Mahoney, Cox Architecture, Zaha Hadid Architects, Elenberg Fraser and Woods Bagot. The landmark tower competition is run by Melbourne-based property development company ICD Property. Each of the teams were asked to complete two versions of their design, one following current city Unitary Plan rules and one version that could be built given more open planning parameters.

+ 1

eVolo Magazine is pleased to invite architects, students, engineers, designers, and artists from around the globe to take part in the 2019 Skyscraper Competition. Established in 2006, the annual Skyscraper Competition is one of the world’s most prestigious awards for high-rise architecture. It recognizes outstanding ideas that redefine skyscraper design through the implementation of novel technologies, materials, programs, aesthetics, and spatial organizations along with studies on globalization, flexibility, adaptability, and the digital revolution. It is a forum that examines the relationship between the skyscraper and the natural world, the skyscraper and the community, and the skyscraper and the city.

Airbnb is giving four lucky winners the honor of being among “the first people in thousands of years to spend the night on the Great Wall of China.” The competition, open until August 11th, offers the prize of staying in a custom-designed home situated on one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

The competition, run in collaboration with the Beijing Tourism Development Committee, is intended to “promote sustainable tourism to China by spotlighting wide-ranging efforts to preserve the Wall’s deep heritage and bring Chinese culture to life.” The four winners will have to adhere to strict House Rules, such as respecting their 1.38 billion neighbors, refraining from waking ancient guards with loud music, and promising not to disturb dragons.

+ 10

Hungarian architects Paradigma Ariadné push the concepts of progression and growth to a literal spatial extreme in their proposal for a new sport complex for the MTK Football Academy. Drawing inspiration from the diagram of traditional European peasant houses, the design stretches into a kind of visual infinity, stacking all the rooms in the building along a single horizontal axis.

+ 6

Chicago-based STLarchitects revealed their design for the former Chicago Spire site. The competition brief called for two towers: one supporting a mixture of apartments and condominiums and the other strictly for condominium use. Their design focused on "Chicago’s architectural character and essential virtues... thus iconic, innovative, and flexible.

+ 24

The parking garage: a loveless structure as necessary as it is unpopular. It can be easy for the architecture to reflect the unfancied nature, but sometimes, amidst all the mediocrity, beautiful design shines through.

Airport parking site Looking4.com has relaunched their award for the World’s Coolest Car Park, first published in 2013, that showcases some of the most innovative parking structures from around the world. Below is the 10 building shortlist—which one do you think deserves to take home the award?

+ 12

THEME

NOVA DESIGN AWARD: Future Living Space

THE BRIEF

We live in a time of great change. As paradigmatic shifts in technology, social networks and the physical environment constantly reshape our way of living, we can foresee that the living space of the future in 10 or even 5 years will be drastically different from what it is today.

How will we live in 2025 with updated basic needs and redefined living spaces? Perhaps, physical space and distance will further give way to digital connectivity, while inter-personal relationships will be complicated by our latest affair with artificial intelligence. Or, unsustainable urban development and the celebration of all things virtual will come to a halt and humans will engage in a renewed conversation with each other and the environment.

Bee Breeders have announced the winners of the Iceland Northern Lights Rooms competition, where entrants were tasked with designing a series of guest houses that framed the beauty of the surrounding context. In response to the delicate landscape, Mývatn Lake in Iceland, the brief outlined a number of restrictions. These included no permanent construction within 200m from the lake, and that all guest houses were to be movable. Shared themes throughout all the successful proposals were specific material experimentation, “distinct interaction with the site and sky,” scalable design, irand cost-conscious solutions.

+ 75

Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects has won an international contest for the Chengdu Natural History Museum in China, seeing off competition from firms such as Zaha Hadid Architects and FUKSAS. With a form inspired by the geological impact of shifting tectonic plates, and reflecting pools inspired by ancient irrigation systems, the scheme makes heavy reference to the surrounding natural landscape, while dominant features such as a tall central atrium form a visual connection with the built environment. Below, the architects offer their own description of the winning scheme.

+ 3

The winners of arch out loud’s competition Reside - in which entrants were to design a mixed residential development on one of the last remaining sections of undeveloped Mumbai coastline - have been announced. The architectural research initiative challenged entrants to design for “both the indigenous fishing community that has occupied the site for hundreds of years - as well as a new demographic drawn to the affluent neighborhood that now encompasses the site”.

+ 26

Bee Breeders have announced the winners of the Nemrut Volcano Eyes Competition, where participants were tasked with designing a visitor observation platform on top of Nemrut, a dormant volcano in eastern Turkey. With the unique natural environment, including a caldera and a pair of lakes, the observation platform is intended to provide unobstructed views of the extraordinary landscape. The jury encouraged submissions that were cost-effective, environmentally-responsible, and energy-efficient.

Below are the winners of the competition: 

+ 32

The Association of Siamese Architects (ASA) has announced the winners of the 2018 VEX: Agitated Vernacular Competition. This year’s ASA International Design Competition aimed to "upend the typical associations of vernacular architecture and design," what vernacular should or should not be. The goal was to re-think vernacular as something that can "assume performative roles and possess generative potentials."

The winning designs challenge the notion that vernacular design is opposed to modernity, thus it is "static and unimprovable," and opposed to technology. Selected from over 230 applications from nearly 30 countries worldwide, the six winning projects are from The Netherlands, India, China, Poland, and Thailand.

Transborder has announced their estimated completion date of 2020 for the extension to Oslo's Center for Studies of the Holocaust and Religious Minorities. The building, Villa Grande, was once the residence of the leader of the Norwegian Nazi Party during the invasion years. "This faceted legacy where important contributions to the appearance of the villa arose from a dark and hateful ideology, demanded a critical adaptation of the extension where one had to have a conscious attitude to historical layers of the building."

+ 7

Hosted by the Australian Tapestry Workshop (ATW) the Tapestry Design Prize for Architects (TDPA) is the only international tapestry award for architects. The TDPA invites architects from around the world to design a tapestry for a hypothetical site.

Boullée’s mooted building that inspired the Pharos Wing, MONA, has been announced as the TDPA 2018 hypothetical site on Tuesday 20 March 2018.

MONA was designed by Fender Katsalidis Architects to house David Walsh’s extraordinary collection of old and new art.

Videos

Mecanoo has released images of their competition-winning social housing proposal for the city of Kaohsiung, Taiwan. The 234-unit-scheme embodies Mecanoo’s philosophy towards social housing, “defined by flexibility, the right balance of private and communal spaces, mixing housing types, connection with the environment and identity.” Comprised of two buildings linked by a green canopy, the scheme is designed for a variety of users, including students, young families, the elderly, or people with special needs.

+ 8

The shortlisted schemes for the RIBA Competition to design the new Innovative Nature and Wellbeing Center, located in Sevenoaks Wildlife Reserve, are now on display to the public. The competition launched last October by Kent Wildlife Trust, in partnership with The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), as an open design competition "seeking worldwide architects and teams to put forward designs that promote learning, wellbeing, curiosity and nature" for a new visitor center at Sevenoaks.

London-based AIM STUDIO’s entry for the Małopolska Science Center in Krakow, Poland, was recently awarded second place. Responding to the competition's call for an iconic design for the center, the team proposed a structure that creates a new landmark which blurs the boundaries between landscape and building, while also taking into consideration the important historical context of the site.

Read about more their proposal after the break.

Bee Breeders has announced the winners of the recent Sydney Affordable Housing Challenge. The international architecture competition asked entrants to address the growing affordable housing crisis in Sydney. The challenge aimed at "garnering global attention to the important issue of housing in Sydney, Australia, where the economy is strong but the residential market is among the least affordable, according to surveys of major metropolitan markets."