Awarded Competitions: The Latest Architecture and News

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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The International Garden Festival has announced the five designs selected to be displayed at the 17^th edition of the Festival at Les Jardins de Métis / Redford Gardens in Grand-Métis, Canada. The five winning gardens, selected from 203 projects submitted from 31 countries, will join previous years’ winners in the larger display of interactive spaces created by more than 85 landscape architects, architects, and designers.

The five winning gardens for the 2016 edition of The International Garden Festival are:

Winner of the AWR International Ideas Competition to design a new nursery school, “Nursery Fields Forever” reimagines what nursery schools could be like. Designed by a team from Italy, composed of Gabriele Capobianco, Edoardo Capuzzo Dolcetta, Jonathan Lazar, and Davide Troiani, the entry refutes the modern notion of shaping a child’s perception of the world based solely on urban environments, accepting children as being inherently curious naturalists. This trait is stimulated and guided to create a unique educational approach, holistically combining nature and food cultivation into its curriculum.

Seven winter stations have been erected along Toronto’s beaches adding color and refuge to the shoreline during the winter months. Part of the annual Winter Stations design competition, this year’s theme was “Freeze/Thaw,” which asked participants to respond to “the changing climactic conditions and transitions of the Toronto winter.”

Four professional designs and three student designs were built this year, transforming existing lifeguard stations into vibrant installations. A community fire place was also designed and implemented by Canadian architect Douglas Cardinal. The installations will stay open until March 19, 2016. View images of each winter station after the break.

U-R-A | United Riga Architects and Evgeni Leonov have won the competition to renovate Alberta Square in Riga, Latvia. The design combines the historical heritage of the site as the location of the first ancient Latvian settlements in Riga with the cultural heritage of Riga Black Balsam, a drink created by medieval pharmacist Abraham Kunce, who lived around the corner from the site.

One of 23 teams selected in the Reinventer.paris competition, Jacques Ferrier Architecture, Chartier Dalix Architectes and SLA Architects have unveiled their winning proposal for the Ternes-Villers site, titled “Multi-Layered City.” Located at Boulevard Périphérique (Ring Road), the competition entry has a unique opportunity to transform Paris at a highly strategic spot.

Architectural design office UNK project has won a competition to design the Atomic Energy Pavilion in Moscow’s Exhibition of Achievements of National Economy (VDNH), an area that has been in the process of redevelopment and growth since 2013. The pavilion aims to share the “history of the native nuclear industry” and its “contribution into modern economic development," according to competition organizer ROSATOM.

Of the six competition entries to advance to the final stage, the UNK project design, was the only that “decided not to pursue the literal associations with the atom and atomic energy in the hardware of the pavilion, but rather dispersed it in its software," according to the architects.

BPD Marignan and XTU Architects, in association with SNI Group and MU Architecture, have won the Réinventer.Paris competition for Paris Rive Gauche site M5A2. The winning project, called In Vivo, seeks to “[promote] social mix and openness between citizens and [integrate] nature into cities, to achieve a fairer, more sustainable, and resilient city,” through three buildings for humans, and one to raise earthworms for vermicomposting of inhabitants’ organic waste.

London-based firm Carmody Groarke has been selected to design a standalone hotel suite on Burgh Island, a tidal island on the South Devon coast. Commissioned by Burgh Island Ltd, the owners of the site's eponymous Grade-II listed art deco hotel, the new standalone "Pool House" suite sits atop the island's cliffs offering customers generous views of the Bantham Estuary and the hotel’s Mermaid Pool, an outdoor seawater pool and private beach for hotel guests.