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Four public space challenges, four ways to win $5,000

The NXT City Prize is a celebration of bold, visionary ideas for public space. This year, we’ve shaken things up with four site-specific public space challenges to make your mark on our city’s public realm.

Submit your idea and show leading civic players what you would do if you were given a blank slate to make Toronto even better – with $20,000 in cash prizes to be won!

No technical drawings, no budgets needed. This is an ideas competition.

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The Extreme Model Railroad and Contemporary Architecture Museum has selected Gehry Partners to replace Gluckman Tang as lead architects of their new museum planned for the town of North Adams, Massachusetts, reports the Berkshire Eagle.

Along with the change in designer comes a change in location to an 83,000-square-foot site on Christopher Columbus Drive (near contemporary art museum Mass MoCA) and a major increase in scope – while original plans called for a 45,000-square-foot museums, new figures project the building will total as much as 75,000 square feet.

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Videos

The Guinness Book of World Records has crowned a new world champion sandcastle in a surprising location: the landlocked city of Duisburg, Germany.

Rising 55 feet (16.68 meters) into the sky, the sandscraper is formed from more than 3,860 tons of sand sculptured by a team of designers from 10 countries over a three week period. Stylized as a magnificent medieval city, the design also incorporates familiar structures from around the world, including an appropriately leaning scale version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

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The team of Foster + Partners and Branch Technology have been awarded first prize in the latest stage of NASA’s 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge, a $2.5 million multi-phase competition designed to generate ideas and advance technology for the construction of sustainable housing solutions “for Earth and beyond.”

After printing three cylinder and three beams the first two levels of Phase 2, Stage 3 asked teams to design and print a 1.5-meter dome using indigenous Martian soil and recyclable materials, envisioning how future habitats could be constructed on the Red Planet. Teams were required to develop the 3-D printing technology itself as well as the structural design for each dome. The competition also dictated each structure be built within a 22-hour time frame, using the specific materials, geometric tolerances and autonomous performance that would be demanded by the Martian landscape.

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Design juries undoubtedly form the very foundation of architecture school. Their success or failure, however, largely lies in the hands of the jurors who are assigned to review student work. While architecture is an inter-disciplinary subject with wide-ranging consequences, most jurors are specialists in a singular sub-field. This makes design juries a terrifyingly unpredictable affair; students don’t just battle against their nerves and sleep-deprivation, but are also required to be on their toes to ensure that they can handle anything that the jurors might throw at them.

However, this is easier said than done. As a student, defending your work against criticism from an easily-offended know-it-all juror will probably do you more harm than good. Similarly, it’s hard to impress a building services expert by harping on about the probable positive sociological impacts of your design proposal. Being able to correctly identify the academic or emotive leanings of a juror can go a long way in helping students present their work strategically, thus ensuring that they make the most of their jury experience. Here’s a compilation of nine types of design jurors every architecture student will probably face at some point in school:

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Videos

McMurdo Station, the American Antarctic base, was never meant to be a permanent settlement when it was built in 1956, yet today it is home to 250 people full-time in addition to approximately 1,000 summer workers each year. Consisting now of over 100 buildings spread across 164 acres, the settlement acts as a logistical base for field science but is dysfunctional for the scientists and researchers who live and work there and inefficient in terms of meeting the demands of Antarctica’s harsh climate. OZ Architecture has recently unveiled a new master plan for McMurdo that aims to turn the station into a model of American leadership in science, engineering, sustainability, and architecture, condensing the current sprawl into a 300,000 square foot campus composed of 6 buildings.

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In this short film, part of a four-part video series co-produced by Curbed and The Verge, the Bosco Verticale—the towering residential forest in the dense urban environment of Milan—is examined for its architectural prowess, as well as its botanical aptitude. In the film, architect Stefano Boeri and expert arborists explain what makes the skyscraper so unique, as well as it's very real potential effect on air pollution in the city.

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