Sponsors: The Van Alen Institute, City of West Palm Beach Type: open, international Fee: None Language: English Timetable: 27 July 2016 – Preregistration deadline* 21 August 2016 – Registration and submission deadline Process:
In the design competition, two finalist teams will be selected to participate in a three-month design process and receive a $45,000 stipend to develop their work. The winning team will go on to implement a portion of their project.
In the research competition, one team will be selected to participate in a three-month research process to develop and implement a pilot study. The research team will receive a $40,000 stipend to develop their work, and a $10,000 stipend to implement their pilot study.
Jury:
Colin Ellard Associate Professor, University of Waterloo – Department of Psychology
Patrick Franklin President and CEO, Urban League of Palm Beach County
David van der Leer Executive Director, Van Alen Institute
Jeri Muoio Mayor, City of West Palm Beach
Penni Redford Sustainability Manager, City of West Palm Beach
Terrence Riley Principal, K/R
Jon Ward Executive Director, West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency
Lilly Weinberg Director of Community Foundations, Knight Foundation
Claire Weisz Founding Principal, WXY Studio
Nancy Wells Professor, Cornell University, College of Human Ecology, Design and Environmental Analysis Department
Design Challenge: Both the design competition and the research competition use West Palm Beach as a model to reimagine our waterfront cities and better understand individuals’ relationships to the built environment. The designcompetition seeks two multidisciplinary design teams to envision the future of waterfront cities. The winning design team will work with West Palm Beach Community Redevelopment Agency to develop the first phase of their proposal in West Palm Beach. The research competition seeks a research team to identify ways that the urban environment affects our minds and bodies. The winning research proposal will be developed into a pilot research study in West Palm Beach. Shore to Core asks: How can we recreate an urban core so its design is intelligent, flexible, and responsive to the needs of residents and visitors? Many aspects of our lives are shaped by the environments in which we spend our time, and by developing a better understanding of these relationships, we can use design to improve wellbeing in cities.
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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