Architecture competition organizer Bee Breeders has announced the winners of the international Iceland Trekking Cabins competition, which called for entries to design a cabin with provision for enclosure, place, and social collectivity. As a structure for nomads and backpackers, Iceland Trekking Cabins are associated with cultural folklore and exist within the context of fjords, lava fields, glaciers, mountains, and the respective trekking ethos.
The competition furthermore sought projects that are “a supple and dexterous yet protected architecture, sensitive to the landscape though guarded against its severity, accommodating for the community, but in the company of strangers.”
The winners of the Iceland Trekking Cabins Competition are:
The prolific Bee Breeder competitions encourage innovative and conceptual responses to charged architectural situations. The latest competition asked participants to consider the expansive material applications (and implications) of one of the world's most prominent building materials; concrete. Described by Bee Breeders as a "poetic manifestation" of its constituent parts, concrete was then to form the basis for the Rome Concrete Poetry Hall.
The presence of the new, multi-purpose building in Rome required an awareness of the historic influences bordering the site. A further requirement was the excavation of the ground, a reference to Rome's archeological past. According to Bee Breeders, the judges favored those projects which thoroughly addressed the "spatial, material, structural, conceptual, and cultural agency of this ever expanding building science."
Through their international architecture competitions, Bee Breeders give young architects and designers the platform to question the social and political role of architecture. Their latest competition, a Cannabis Bank without a specified site, was an open-ended question into the role and relevance of the increasingly normalised substance. The judges selected three winners and six honorable mentions, all of which presented ideas that open up the discourse around cannabis and its integration into the built environment.
As the architecture of cannabis still remains undefined territory, it has historically been associated with refits of other building types such as tea houses, cafes, public houses or pharmacies. This ambiguity left the field open for entrants to be as fantastic and progressive as they desired, with respect to the impact of the program on their social context. The judges commented that the most successful projects presented a, "consideration of individual experience — medicinal, psychological, and spiritual; sensitive accommodation in space and circulation for both the intimate and social; clearly defined context and locale; and innovation of an undefined spatial, tectonic, and architectural typology."
Bee Breeders, organizers of international architectural competitions, have announced this week the three winners and six honorable mentions of their Uganda LGBT Youth Asylum Center competition. Inspired by recent activism in Uganda, Bee Breeders sought the design of a community center to welcome those in the LGBT community who have been ostracized from their home environments. The judges said that they were looking for designs that focused on social integration, not isolation, celebrating those who created "a community center, not a prison."
Architecture competition organizers Bee Breeders have announced the winners of the London Internet Museum competition. This speculative project challenged architects to design a museum for “something historically profound and typologically unprecedented — the internet.” Given a site at the former Great Eastern Railway terminal station building, designers were tasked with creating a location that would “connect visitors to both the history of the internet and open them to the possibilities of the future.” Submissions took a wide variety of approaches, and prizes were awarded to projects that rejected the typical associations and precedents that the internet calls to mind.
Continue reading to see the winning entries with brief descriptions.
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."
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.
Bee Breeders has announced the winner of the Krakow Oxygen Home competition, which asked designers to reconsider contemporary architectural conventions with respect to current cultural and global issues in the city of Krakow, Poland. Due to the large number of coal-burning furnaces in the city, residents of Krakow are threatened by air pollution, which has resulted in a sky-rocketing number of cases of asthma, lung disease, and lung cancer. The competition brief called for the “design of a care center for lung cancer patients as part of the Maria Sklodowska-Curie Memorial Institute of Oncology.”
