Open Call for 2019 Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture: Eyes of the City Exhibition
Sponsors: Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture Type: Open, international Languages: Chinese, English
Timetable: 31 May 2019 – Submissions deadline Challenge:
The Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture is the only biennial exhibition in the world based exclusively on urbanism and urbanisation. Co-organised by the neighbouring cities of Shenzhen and Hong Kong, the three-month event brings together international practitioners and theorists from a diverse range of disciplines to promote discourse and public engagement with globally shared issues in and around urbanism.
The eighth edition of the Biennale launches in Shenzhen on 15 December 2019. The location is the Futian district of Shenzhen, with Futian Railway Station acting as the main Biennale hub supported by clusters of sub-venues across the city. For the event, the space in and around the station will be re-designed and transformed in line with the 2019 Urban Interactions theme.
The open call asks what kind of digitally-augmented city we want to build for tomorrow and seeks responses to a series of specific questions set out in a curatorial statement that relate to the interrelationships of people, technology and the city.
Applicants can submit in one of three categories:
Design projects Designers, architects, architectural offices and practitioners are challenged to conceive installations that demonstrate an experimental approach to the Biennale theme and specific context while engaging visitors in a highly interactive participatory relationship with their spatial environment. Participants are encouraged to form multi-disciplinary teams combining expertise from research and industry that will open up new perspectives on the relation between users and urban space, and which will create a legacy for the city of Shenzhen.
Research projects Research-based practices, universities and research centres operating in and around the design disciplines are invited to propose innovative research projects that explore the potential of design practice as a mediating tool between digital and physical spaces in the future city. Proposals should aim to use the Biennale locale as a testing ground for new methods of research and practice that can be applied by scientific and professional communities worldwide.
Critical essays Scholars, critics, philosophers, historians, thinkers and researchers operating in and around the design disciplines are encouraged to propose contributions to ignite further modes of theoretical exploration into the relationship between cities and technologies. Proposals should open up new perspectives on relationships between design practice, user experience and urban space and should aim to contribute to outlining new theoretical ways of conceiving the city.
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.
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 renovation of Miremont-le-Cret n 2012 was unusual in that the project was the subject of a competition. This building had long been landmarked as one of Geneva’s most significant modern accomplishments, designed in 1953 by a local architect, Marc-Joseph Saugey. The building’s design is remarkable in how it fits into a somewhat narrow, elongated site, but solving the issue of monotony that could naturally arise, had the facades not consisted of a simple elevation with no protruding edges. Instead Saugey came up with the idea of a faceted treatment of the facade on both sides of the structure, thus eliminating any notion of boredom on the part of a casual visitor.
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.
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.
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