Sponsor: City of Gwangju, UIA Type: International, open, anonymous Fee: None Languages: English, Korean Timetable: 11 December 2019 – Registration deadline! 7 February 2020 – Submission deadline 12 February 2020 – Jury session Awards: 1st Prize- Design Development and Construction Document Priority right (with approx. KRW 17.3 billion for the design) 2nd Prize- KRW 50 million (US$42,000) 3rd Prize- KRW 2.5 million (each for 2 winners) Jurors: 1. Thomas Vonier, Architect (UIA, President) 2. Robert Greenwood (Snohetta, Norway 3. Min, Hyun Sik (Kiohun Architects, Korea) 4. Kim, Sung Hong(University of Seoul, Korea) 5.Choi, Moon-Gyu (Yonsei University, Korea) 6. Oh, Se Gyu (Chonnam National University, Korea) 7.Choi, Kyung Yang(Hansem Architects Group, Korea) Deputy Juror 8. Chung, Hyun A(DIA Architecture, Korea)
Design Challenge:
Gwangju’s New Milestone
This project is a milestone-making task planned by Gwangju in order to move into a new era. Therefore, it aims to embrace future-oriented values such as from ‘development’ to ‘regeneration’, from ‘device’ to ‘knowledge’, and from ‘efficiency and administrative priority’ to ‘culture and participation priority’ that are pursued by Gwangju. We expect the plan to capture this value, both symbolically and practically.
A Place of Social and Urban Solidarity
The plan should carefully examine various conditions around the site to derive the value and potential of the site to come up with a specific city order. In addition, a reasonable setting and linkage between public facilities and public places should be considered by referring to social and urban contexts. It is hoped that this place will become a place of solidarity and communication for members of society. The Site
Public Library and Residents’ Sports Facilities
In the first stage site area of 10,200m2 out of 31,871m², a total ground area of 11,000m², the public library and residents’ sports facilities will be built.
Incineration Site
The library site is located in a garbage incineration site in the Sangmu district that was closed in 2016. The remaining incineration plant will be rebuilt as a complex cultural facility after remodeling.
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:
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.
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.”
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.
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