Fees: €150; additional entries by same teams are €50
Challenge
The ideology of the mixed-city is now shared. But how mixed is actually the mixed-city? In many urban development projects housing is the main program. We add some offices and public amenities, bars and shops to create a “genuine vibrant urban neighborhood”. But one program has been excluded: the productive economy. It has left the city to go to the periphery. There is now in many European cities a spatial and social mismatch between living and working conditions. The city provides high-skilled professionals with many working possibilities while a large part of low-skilled workers live in the city with no work opportunity. This mismatch generates many problems with regard to economy, mobility and sociality. Production should be encouraged in the city, be part of the fabric, it should be seen, connected to shared daily life, nurtured and celebrated.
1- How to integrate some of the production activities in the city –food, energy, services, new industrial products– to enhance relations between citizens?
2- How to live in productive fields and to produce in living environment? How to manage the tensions between production and local life?
3- How to integrate production cycles considering distribution, waste and consumption, encouraging a diversity of (shorter?) cycles in local contexts and articulate them to a larger eco-scale?
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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