Finalists in the Kaunas M.K. Čiurlionis Concert Centre International Design Contest announced
UAB Paleko Archstudija and UAB Baltic Engineers; Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios; and Adam Khan Architects announced as the finalists of the Kaunas M.K. Čiurlionis Concert Centre International Design Contest
• 117 teams entered the contest from 36 countries • All concept designs for the Centre were judged anonymously • New M.K. Čiurlionis Concert Centre to provide much-needed world-class performance venue for Lithuania • Regenerative project for the European Capital of Culture 2022 will foreground the River Nemunas and revitalise a central area close to the historic Old Town • Six honourable mentions awarded
Kaunas City Municipality and competition organisers Malcolm Reading Consultants today [28 September 2017] announced the three finalists in the open anonymous design contest for the new circa €30m Kaunas M.K. Čiurlionis Concert Centre.
The finalists were:
• UAB Paleko Archstudija and UAB Baltic Engineers (Lithuania) • Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios (United Kingdom) • Adam Khan Architects (United Kingdom)
The six practices given honourable mentions were:
• Mark Foster Gage Architects (US) • Ja Architecture Studio (Canada) • William Olmsted Antozzi Office of Architecture, TARI Architects and Derek Pirozzi Design Workshop (US) • Ateliers O-S Architectes (France) • RARE architecture (United Kingdom) • Studija Heima, MB and Vaidas Saveikis (Lithuania)
Following the jury’s selection of the three finalist schemes for this landmark building of circa 11,750 sq m, the architects’ names – contained in sealed envelopes – were opened this morning by the Competition Director Malcolm Reading at a press conference in Kaunas. Mr Reading read out the names of the 117 practices in order of competition ranking.
Selected as European Capital of Culture 2022, Kaunas is becoming increasingly known as one of the Baltics’ key knowledge and cultural hubs. However, despite a lively arts and music scene, Kaunas – and Lithuania – lacks a first-rank concert hall with the facilities and acoustic quality to host leading orchestras and ensembles.
As the brief to competitors explained, this new building on a riverside site with memorable panoramas to the Old and New Towns should also provide multi-functional spaces for conferences, congresses and symposia.
Given Kaunas’ exceptional architectural heritage – the city is en route to becoming a UNESCO Site for Modernist Architecture – the architectural quality and contribution to the cityscape were the essential criteria used to judge the finalist designs.
In these times when political emotions run high and gun violence is the norm, not the exception; and when emotions no longer are held in check, but encouraged by our leaders, minorities become easy targets for those who adhere to ideologies based primarily on exclusivity and hate.
The LGBT community has long been the target of various segments of our society; but the massacre that took place at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, a favorite hangout for gays, elevated this phenomenon to a new level. After an event that claimed the lives of 49 victims, injured 68 others, and left hundreds permanently traumatized, it should come as no surprise that a memorial to this tragedy has been front and center in the minds of the community ever since. Because the very nature of this event has drawn nationwide attention, the community wanted to get it right. So it was only logical that they would turn to a competition as the most viable vehicle for arriving at a solution for the design of a memorial, as well as a museum. For this, the onePULSE Foundation was formed, to memorialize this tragedy and “ensure that Pulse”s legacy of love, acceptance and hope will never be lost.”
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.
As part of a policy to relocate archives of local interest outside of major Bavarian cities, a competition was staged for the design of a new archive in Kitzingen, 12 miles from the provincial capital city of Würzburg, Germany. The competition was open to qualified teams in the EU, with 25 firms identified to take part in a competition. Since five firms were preinvited, 20 openings were available for the 79 applicants that vied for participation in the competition. In the end, 23 firms submitted designs for the final adjudication process.
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:
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.”
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