With the theme of ‘No Precedent’ this year, the annual Architectural League Prize competition invited young architects and designers to submit their work. Projects of all types, either theoretical or real, and executed in any medium, are welcome. Driven by the desire to create, to be heard, to keep busy or to fulfill untapped and forbidden niches, young architects are a self-defining generation. They are unwilling to wait their turn or to follow in footsteps. It has become normative for young architects to cast aside unfit precedents, codes, rules, and primitives, restlessly defining their projects, their problems, their methodologies, their users, and their spaces of intervention. Their work becomes uncategorizable, suggestive, and speculative; it’s on the brink. It’s neither here nor there, but fodder for the future. The competition deadline is February 15th. For more information, please visit their website here.

Gwynne Pugh Urban Design Studio, in conjunction with garcia architecture + design, was recently selected from a pool of sixteen firms to design the new CAPSLO Homeless Services Center located in San Luis Obispo, California. Since 1997, there have been two shelters providing services to the homeless community. However, when the county offered a site, it was determined that a consolidated center would be able to operate much more efficiently, 24 hours a day. More details after the break.

Comeandcheck.it and InTech Ltd. are releasing an international competition for designing transport-packaging. The goal of the project is to create and realize conceptual, esthetical, functional and technically sufficient or innovative packaging for transport of a hardcover book. The competition is open to all full-aged designers, artists and architects (both professionals and students) with the registration deadline December 30th and submission deadline on January 23rd. Your solution must protect the book from damage during transport and weigh less than 200g. For more information, visit the competition website here.

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The American Institute of Architects (AIA) Diversity Recognition Program seeks submissions featuring exemplary efforts to diversify the architecture profession. The jury will select up to 12 submissions as diversity best practices meriting the following recognition: AIA Diversity Recognition Program Award, Profiled in AIArchitect and on the AIA Diversity Web page, Acknowledgment at the AIA National Convention: Diversity Recognition Program Awards Presentation and Diversity Recognition Program Exhibit. The AIA must receive all submissions by March 1, 2012. For more information, please visit their website here.

Architectural firm 10 Design from Shanghai and Hong Kong is inviting anyone of all ages – architects, students artists, all who are interested – to take part at their recently started competition, Re-thinking Shanghai 2012.

Along with engineers G.O.C. and Cabanelas Castelo Architects, Foster + Partners have won an international competition to design a new high-speed rail station in the city of Ourense in Galicia, located in northwestern Spain. The winning proposal integrates transport infrastructure with a new urban park, providing a large public space that will open up a series of pedestrian links to connect the districts divided by the track.

National land charity the Land Trust and RIBA Competitions launched an international competition this week until the last week in March to find the most inspirational design and funding team to create a new visitor destination and public open space at the former Cronton Colliery in Knowsley. The competition is open to architects and architect-led multi-disciplinary design teams and will be in two stages, judged anonymously in the first stage. A shortlist will then be invited to enhance and present their designs and potential funding propositions at interview as part of the second stage. More information on the competition after the break.

Olympic Park Legacy Company has announced the winners of two competitions that will transform the north park and south plaza at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London. New York-based James Corner Field Operations’ proposal for a 50 acre urban landscape consisting of a tree-lined promenade connecting flexible event and cultural spaces was selected as the winning entry for the south plaza.

DesignByMany’s latest challenge: Electric Vehicle Charging Station sponsored by HP and media partners ArchDaily. Historically, the filling station was designed with the basic concept of sheltering those in need of filling up their tanks and nothing more. However, as consumers adopt an environmentally conscious lifestyle and hybrid technology advances, the functionality of the filling station is no longer what it used to be. This challenge is to design an electric vehicle charging station that will define a new era of electric mobility.

New Practices New York, a biennial competition since 2006, serves as the preeminent platform in New York City to recognize and promote new and innovative architecture and design firms. The juried portfolio competition is sponsored by the New Practices Committee of the AIA New York Chapter and honors firms that have utilized unique and innovative strategies, both for the projects they undertake and for the practices they have established. Participants must register by January 15th. To register and for more detailed information, please visit their website here.

Magda Mostafa, guest editor for the Open House International Journal and associate professor at the American University in Cairo announced a call for papers for their special issue on the topic of built environments for special populations. More information on the call for papers including important dates and deadlines after the break.

Since 2006, the International Art Consultants (IAC) has celebrated architects’ passion for photography through the Architect’s Eye Awards. Simon Kennedy won the Architecture and Place category this year with his image of the ‘Heygate Estate’, while Revti Halai’s photo of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion received runner-up. The Architecture and People category was won by Neil Dusheiko’s photograph of ‘Unite d’Habitation’, and Chris Drummond’s ‘Ghosts of the Underground’ received runner-up.

The final entries are in for the international redesign competition of the St. Petersburg Pier in Florida. The competition seeks to generate a new identity and iconic landmark that will honor the history and relevance of the Pier for the next generation. Michael Maltzan Architecture, BIG and West 8 Urbaban Design and Landscape Architecture are the three architectural firms selected from the list of nine semi finalists. Continue reading after the break to view the radically different design proposals.

Published by Analist Group and organized and curated by the Italian Association of Architecture and Criticism_presS/Tfactory, the OUTSIDE THE BOX competition is focused on identifying design ideas for resolving various problems in emergency situations. During recent years, numerous natural phenomena have upset the lives of many communities scattered across the globe. Examples include Fukushima in Japan, Haiti, L’Aquila and New Orleans. The Box is a small temporary structure capable of offering various services: a space that is simultaneously a workstation and information center open to public to allow people remain in touch with the rest of the world. A fundamental role in the elaboration of the design proposal must be entrusted to technology, whether low- or high-tech. The challenge launched by the competition is to combine sustainability and parametric design. The submission deadline is 15 January, 2012. More information on the competition after the break.

Conceived and promoted by the Ferrara Faculty of Architecture, Italy, with the financial support of the Fassa Bortolo company, the aim of the International Award for Sustainable Architecture, now in its ninth edition, is to contribute to the research of a system of development in the building sector. This represents one of the fields of human activity with the greatest impact on the environment, that is more sustainable than our current model, which has lead to a state of deterioration and pollution, bringing us to the verge of a global crisis of the Earth’s entire ecological system.

Architecture for Humanity has launched the 2011 Open Architecture Challenge: RESTRICTED ACCESS, asking architects and designers to partner with community groups across the world and develop innovative solutions to re-envision closed, abandoned and decommissioning military sites. The six-month competition requires designers to work with the communities surrounding these former places of conflict to transform hostile and oftentimes painful locations, into civic spaces built for the public good. More information on the competition after the break.

CityVision, in collaboration with FARM, is proud to announce a new international competition called PFFF, an architecture competition dedicated to architects, designers, students and engineers focused on the design and realization of an inflatable mobile pavilion of 50sqm that can embody the spirit of the FARM project.

With its third annual competition, SMIBE (Society for Moving Images about the Built Environment), sponsored by The Graham Foundation, Archinect, and Image, continues to bring together a growing body of moving image stories about the built environment. They hope the competition will become a forum for the exchange and discussion of persuasive issues about the built world. For this competition, SMIBE welcomes moving image stories that investigate, explore, and entertain our communities about social, environmental, political, technological, and economic issues that designers of the built world should be discussing.