The Future Park Design Ideas Competition: New Public Space for Melbourne
Sponsors: University of Melbourne, in partnership with Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) Type: Open, international, ideas Location: Melbourne, Australia Eligibility: This competition seeks to enhance the role of landscape architecture and the public realm in Australian cities. However, the competition does not restrict entry to registered landscape architects or those studying within landscape architecture programs. Instead the competition aims to inspire an open and dynamic dialogue between built environment disciplines, the broader community, government and the private sector. This single stage competition is open to established and emerging designers (tertiary students) of the built and natural environment disciplines (i.e. landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, environmental planning and ecology, environmental engineering). Victorian high school students studying art, design, environmental studies and associated subjects are also encouraged to submit proposals within the student category. Awards (categories will likely include): Professional and tertiary (international) – Up to AUD$20,000 to be allocated as prizes High school (open to Victorian students only) – Work experience at a landscape architecture office (tbc) Timeline: 22 March 2019 – Official Competition Launch (Melbourne Design Week, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne) 31 May, 2019 – Entries open 1 August,2019 – Submission Deadline September 2019 – Shortlisting Design Challenge: In 1837 surveyor Hoddle’s plan laid the foundations for the city of Melbourne, transforming the endemic landscape of wetlands, open grasslands and custodial lands of the Kulin nation into a speculative real estate grid surrounded by colonial parkland. Featuring a botanic garden, a Domain, along with other significant garden squares and parks, this generous layer of open space was integral to the development of ‘Marvellous’ Melbourne – a vibrant late nineteenth century city of international prominence. Fast forward, and Melbourne’s rapid millennium growth has reshaped the city centre and inner suburbs into a dense urbanism, with apartment towers and medium density housing constructed on former industrial sites and lining major transport corridors. Melbourne is now considered the fourth fastest growing city in the OECD, and is expected by 2050 to eclipse Sydney as Australia’s largest city. This population growth and densification raises questions over the capacity of existing parks to meet the needs of the contemporary city. This idea competition challenges professional and emerging landscape architects, urban designers, architects and planners to speculate on new park possibilities for a future Melbourne. How can parks shape Melbourne’s urban form? Where should this new public open space be located, how should it be configured and what is its role? Is a new signature park in the spirit of Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon Park (2005) or Moscow Zaryadye Park (2018) appropriate, or instead smaller sequences of parks? Should parks be designed at ground level or are other spatial locations possible? Proposals are asked to address these questions in two ways.
1. Make the Space: Restricted to a 10 km radius of Melbourne’s city centre, designers must present a rationale (speculative or other) for the location and configuration of their proposed public open space/s. Strategies for procuring land such as amalgamation, demolition, repurposing, redefining and re zoning should be considered.
2.Design the Place: What is the role of the park in 2050? Designers must present the aesthetic, civic and ecological attributes of their scheme, and highlight how these attributes respond to the challenges facing Melbourne in the mid twenty first century. Key considerations include climate change, shifting demographics and density of the city, Reconciliation, biodiversity and evolving concepts of publicness and community.
The Rise in the City Housing Competition in the African country of Lesotho presented many similarities with student competitions that have occurred over the past decades, the main link being the presence of mentors as advisers to the team(s) who were designing the entries. One of the most famous examples of this was the winning design for the Vietnam Memorial Competition by Maya Lin, who was enrolled at the time in a studio course at Yale University. In that case it was also a case of students competing against professionals. Lin’s design just happened to find favor with the jury.
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.
The features of a truly international competition were quite in evidence in Prague's SMÍCHOV School search for an ideal elementary school design: the event attracted 66 entries from around the world, and the winners were a team from Canada and Poland. The sponsors went so far as to even estimate the number of hours spent by all of the architects who submitted entries for the competition (58,800). One can only imagine what that number might have been for the Helsinki Guggenheim competition, which attracted 1,715 entries.
Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects (PCP) in collaboration with China Southwest Architectural Design and Research Institute Corp Ltd. has prevailed over a strong field to win the competition for a Natural History Museum in Chengdu, China. The other finalists included Zaha Hadid Architects, Sutherland Hussey Harris, Nihon Sekkei, Valode & Pistre, and FUKSAS.
Garage Screen, a program of film screenings on contemporary art and culture, was launched in 2012 and introduces viewers to notable examples of Russian and foreign feature films, documentaries, and experimental films. Since its inception, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art has selected and shown films and videos examining issues of contemporary art and culture in all their manifestations, rare documentary films on the lives and lifestyles of prominent and little-known artists, musicians, architects, and performing artists, as well as films about the creation of exhibitions and works of art.
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