Eligiblity: Open to multidisciplinary teams of architects, engineers, designers, LEED and Living Building Challenge certification experts, landscape architects and designers
Timeline:
February 2014 – Official launch of competition
July 2014 – Winners chosen
Design Challenge:
Space for Life, Montréal’s largest museum and tourist complex, is organizing an international architecture competition for official launch in February 2014. Following the huge success of the Rio Tinto Alcan Planetarium, the Space for Life is reasserting its desire to meld art, science and emotion by creating a unique immersive visitor experience through an innovative pairing of bold architecture and design in three major projects: the Insectarium’s Metamorphosis project, the renewal of the Biodôme and the Botanical Garden’s Glass Pavilion, legacies of Montréal’s 375th birthday.
Inspired by the Space for Life’s mission—to reconnect humans and nature—the competition will seek an overall creative approach where boldness and innovation will be the design hallmarks of an immersive and sensory spatial experience. This offers an exciting opportunity to participate in the evolution of the Space for Life’s and to get involved in making our city the flagship of a vast global movement for biodiversity.
One site: three projects
The three projects in the competition are all located on the Space for Life site. Reflecting a multidisciplinary vision wherein the architectural gesture emerges from a global creative approach, a bold architectural design will create living spaces that are permeable, ecological and evolving, while meeting the highest standards for green building. LEED Platinum certification will be targeted and the Living Building Challenge certification will serve as a source of inspiration for the project. These projects are part of the Space for Life’s $189.3 M investment plan. The Government of Québec has allocated a total budget of $45 million for its realization.
Each of the projects in this contest stands out in its nature, objectives and challenges.
• The Insectarium’s Metamorphosis project will expand and renovate the existing building and some outdoor areas. Inspired by biophilia, its architecture should provide sensory experiences and unexpected encounters that rekindle the relationship between humans and insects.
• The renewed Biodôme project is intended to redevelop some exhibition spaces, including the ecosystems within the Biodôme. It aims to revive the debate on our relationship with nature through a more immersive, introspective and emotional visitor experience that will promote more environmentally respectful behaviour.
•The Botanical Garden’s Glass Pavilion will offer bold, innovative and organic architecture informed by biophilic design principles. Versatile, technologically efficient and flexible, it will host horticultural events as well as environmentally-responsible corporate functions.
In July 2019 the Vilnius Concert Hall competition jury began its deliberations to identify a suitable design for this major performing arts project. As one might have anticipated, two of thejurors on the seven member panel, Ole Gustavsen (Snohetta) and Andreas Cukrowicz (Nachbaur Architekten) had won high profile competitions for similar music center projects—in Oslo and Munich.The jury was confronted with a formidable task, as the competition, organized according to UIA regulations and anonymous in its format, had attracted 248 entries from around the world. For this one-stage competition, the organizers listed the following evaluation criteria, whereby the order of the criteria was not to reflect any priority:
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell OFFICE 52 Architecture Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA Hard cover; 96 pages in color ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
Memorials to commemorate atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II have taken many forms. Holocaust museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. by Pei Cobb Freed or the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, all endeavor to paint a broad picture, including narratives covering most of the major events and sites. Former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald have been frequent tour destinations. In the case of Buchenwald, the local city of Weimar has placed pictures of “Witnesses” throughout the downtown area as a reminder of the Nazi legacy.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
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