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 updating and modernization of Chicago’s O’Hare Airport has been well overdue. Aside from occasional problems caused by Chicago’s winter storms, congestion at the airport has led air travelers to avoid the airport when catching a connecting flight is on the agenda. So Chicago, noted for its modern architecture and the home of several high-profile architecture firms, decided to turn to an invited competition for a solution to these issues.
Competitions in Chicago in the recent past have been anything but encouraging, especially when transparency is an issue. During the competition for the Obama Center on the South Side, the Obama Foundation, which was responsible for the administration of that “competition,” was anything but a model of transparency; and to this day, none of the finalist designs, other than that of the winner, have seen the light of day. In the case of the O’Hare project, videos submitted by the five finalists teams were on public display, and the public was even asked to vote for their favorite.
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.
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.”
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.
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