The U.S. Department of Energy has selected 20 collegiate teams to participate in the 2015 Solar Decathlon at Irvine, California’s Orange County Great Park. The eight returning teams will compete against 12 new teams, with partners from four international schools, to build “solar-powered, highly energy-efficient houses that combine affordability, innovation, and design excellence” within the allotted two-year period. View the full list of competitors, after the break.
Preliminary designs have been released by three shortlisted teams competing to renovate Mies van der Rohe’s historic Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in Washington D.C. - the only library and D.C. building ever designed by the legendary architect. Preview each proposal and learn how you can submit your feedback to the D.C. Public Library before they make their decision, after the break.
Young Projects will be spending the week playing “Match-Maker” in New York City, as the Brooklyn-based studio has debuted their interactive Valentine’s Day installation in the heart of Times Square. Made in collaboration with fabricator Kammetal, as part of Times Square Alliance’s sixth annual heart design competition, the interactive heart-shaped sculpture is designed to cosmically connect people based on their zodiac signs by arranging curious passerby's at twelve points surrounding the installation.
Ziya İmren Architects has recently won an invited competition for the design of the Beykoz School complex in Istanbul. The firm’s winning proposal distinguished itself by embedding its layout within the steep site’s natural surrounding and organizing school as a “cascading” hierarchy of spaces.
In a competition that ultimately crowned Frank Gehry as winner, Berlin’s Barkow Leibinger placed third with their 150-meter “faceted stacked building” proposal clad in glass. Aimed to be Berlin’s tallest building, the apartment and hotel tower is planned to be the city’s first high-rise residential development since the 1970s.
Established in 1982 by the architect Philippe Rotthier, this triennial prize rewards works of collective and cultural value with regional roots and using natural and sustainable materials that draw on the genius of the European town and a dialogue with the past and with history.
This week, just two weeks after the three shortlisted teams submitted their revised proposals for Crissy Field, San Francisco’s Presidio Trust unanimously decided to end the competition. Though the competition raised high hopes over its 14-month duration that the Trust would transform the prominent 8-acre site into a "cultural institution of distinction," its fate has been left to the “wind,” as the SFGate’s John King reports. This means, neither George Lucas’ self-titled cultural arts museum, WRNS Studio and the Chora Group’s sustainability institute, or the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy’s “park-based” cultural center will be realized. You can view each of the rejected proposals here and more details on the cancelation here.
Long Island’s downtowns have more than 4,000 acres of surface area dedicated to parking lots. That’s roughly 6.5 square miles of prime real estate, a phenomenon quite common in most American cities. When necessary, these lots are often exchanged for a standard “set of concrete shelves” that share little to no connection with their surroundings. This leads to the question, why must parking garages be so monofunctional and, well, ugly?
120 HOURS, - one of the worlds most important student competition, for and by architecture students, challenge you to redefine the meaning of sustainability in architecture. The catch; you only have five short days, and you have to convince OMA-partner Ellen Van Loon. Still up for it?
The Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1 has selected "Hy-Fi," a “circular tower of organic and reflective bricks” designed by The Living (David Benjamin), as the winner of the 15th annual Young Architects Program (YAP) in New York. An exemplar of the cradle-to-cradle philosophy, the temporary installation will be built entirely from organic material via a new method of bio-design.
The purpose of the Competition is to obtain the preliminary urban and architectural design for the future urban zone of the Klekovaca Tourist Centre on Klekovaca Mountain. Klekovaca Mountain is located in the western part of Bosnia and Herzegovina and belongs to the central part of the Dinaric Arc - Southeast Europe region. Its highest peak is Velika Klekovaca (1.962m) and it stretches in a north-westerly to southeasterly direction, covering a distance of 43 km.
The American Institute of America’s New York Chapter (AIANY) has selected six young, and “pioneering” firms as the winners of the 2014 New Practices New York portfolio competition. The award is designed “to recognize and promote” emerging practices that are less than a decade old and based within the five boroughs of New York City. As a result, each winner will be featured in an exhibition at the Center for Architecture from October 1, through January 15, 2015.
Trenčín is currently facing changes connected with the relocation of the railway track directly within the city centre as part of the modernisation of the European railway corridor, with planned completion in 2016.
The City of Tampere, the Finnish Transport Agency, the VR-Group and Senate Properties are organizing an international design contest for the Tampere Travel and Service Centre and its environs. The design contest for the travel and service centre is looking for a shared vision for the area’s development as well as shared view on the guidelines for future measures.
The 2014 RIBA Norman Foster Travelling Scholarship has launched and is inviting applications from schools of architecture around the world. A £6,000 grant will be awarded to one student by a panel of judges which includes Lord Foster and the President of the RIBA.
Architecture for Humanity New York (AfHny) is accepting submissions for construction, interior design, landscape, and other design-related projects for the AfHny Community Design Competition 2014. AfHny will select one winning project that will be judged based on its alignment with AfHny’s mission, its perceived impact on the New York community, the submitting organization’s ability to fund the project, and proof of the organization’s ability to impact New York City’s neighborhoods based on past results. The winning project will receive a design competition hosted by AfHny that will result in several schematic design solutions developed by our membership base, which represents some of the top talent in the New York City design community. At the end of the design competition process, the winning organization will select their favored schematic design.
The British Government will showcase Britain’s distinctive qualities of creativity and enterprise to millions of international visitors through the UK Pavilion at Milan Expo 2015.
d3 has unveiled the 2013 winners of Unbuilt Visions, a competition designed to “promote critical debate about architecture and design by acknowledging excellence in unbuilt projects.” Get a glimpse of the four grand prize projects, which were awarded $750 each for their winning contributions, and the eleven special mentions after the break.