Design Challenge: The Council is launching a design competition to appoint an exemplary team of designers to redevelop the Finsbury Leisure Centre site. The winning team will go on to develop detailed designs and a full planning application for the site. Â
The design competition builds on the St Luke’s Area Planning Brief adopted by the Executive in October 2014. The Brief explains how any future proposal will need to deliver much needed new leisure and community facilities, affordable homes and improved public space. Importantly, the Council wants to deliver an exemplary civic building that will bring together leisure, childcare, healthcare and local energy production under one roof. A copy of the Brief and the accompanying consultation report can be found below. Â
The design competition will be run over two stages. During Stage 1, organisations or consortia will complete a Pre-Qualification Questionnaire (PQQ). The PQQ asks organisations and consortia to set out their previous relevant experience to undertake the commission. Up to five organisations or consortia, which score the highest and meet our requirements, will be invited to participate in the design competition (Stage 2).Â
During Stage 2, up to five organisations/consortia will be asked to prepare tender submissions. The tender submission must include a design submission, a number of method statements setting out how they would develop detailed designs, and a pricing schedule setting out how much they would charge for developing detailed designs.  Â
Once submitted, the design submissions will be displayed at a public exhibition. Members of the public will be able to view and comment on the designs. Comments will be made available to the Council’s evaluation panel, which will choose the winner of the competition. The exhibition is expected to take place in early 2016 and last for approximately four weeks.Â
The winning organisation/consortium is expected to be announced in spring 2016. The design team will then begin work on turning their design submission into a detailed design and full planning application for the site. It is expected to take around 18 months to prepare detailed designs and a full planning application. If planning permission is granted, construction could begin as early as summer 2018. Â
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.”
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.
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.
The Rails to Trails program, which gained momentum after the1984 Federal Land Banking Law—supported by the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy—has seen over 24,000 miles of trails established where rail lines once existed. Some sites were strictly urban, while others, sometimes over 100 miles in length, were primarily rural, while others combined some of both.
The reunification of Germany in 1989 not only had a great impact on the lives of many Germans, especially those living in the former DDR,but together with the decision to move the nation’s capital from Bonn to Berlin resulted in two major international design competitions in 1992: the first was to convert the existing Reichstag building into a home for the German parliament, the second being the Spreebogen planning competition, which included a chancellery for the head of state as well as needed buildings nearby for the Federal government.
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