January 29, 2010 | Broadcast | News
cutting, stacking, perforating, bending, layering, molding
just a couple of operations performed on a daily basis at Vincent de Rijk’s model making outfit in Rotterdam, which fabricates models and prototypes for architects and industrial designers ranging from (and especially) OMA to Richard Hutten. perfect inspiration for those days when you just can’t figure out how to make that model…
[image courtesy Vincent de Rijk]
January 24, 2010 | Broadcast | News
URA launches public consultation exercise for Concept Plan 2011
by JOANNE CHAN, FOR CHANNEL NEWS ASIA
The Singapore Government is seeking public feedback on how the country should use its land over the next 40 to 50 years.
A consultation exercise for Concept Plan 2011 was launched by the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) on Saturday. Four issues will be considered during the planning process, including how to enhance the quality of life and build a sense of belonging. The other two issues deal with an ageing population and growing the nation in a sustainable way.
What does is mean to be Singaporean, and how can we provide for the needs of an ageing population are just some of the questions that will be discussed by two focus groups during the public consultation exercise.
Lee Tzu Yang, co-chair, Focus Group on Sustainability and Identity, said: “In terms of identity, it is not about hardware, it is about software. It is about how people want to live in the neighbourhood.
“Once we know how people want to live in the neighbourhood, I think that will suggest to URA the kind of hardware that needs to be put in.”
And in land scarce Singapore, planners need to balance different competing needs which can affect the quality of life.
Professor Tan Chorh Chuan, co-chair, Focus Group on Quality of Life and Ageing, said: “Quality of life means different things for different groups of people, and how do we bring all this together into something which will provide an optimal mix of facilities as well as amenities for a broad section of people.”
The Concept Plan is reviewed every 10 years to reflect changing trends.
Elaborating on these trends, National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan said: “Competition from other cities, the need for us to accommodate the changing demographics in Singapore, ageing population, and of course, the need for us to grow in a more sustainable way.”
Previous Concept Plans have had a major impact on Singapore’s landscape. For example, when the first Concept Plan was established in 1971, plans were drawn up for major infrastructure projects such as Changi Airport, and the first MRT lines.
URA is also seeking online feedback from the public via its website. - CNA/ms
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge HK Boundary Crossing Facilities International Design Ideas Competition
The new Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge (HKZMB) links up Hong Kong, Zhuhai and Macao in the Pearl River Delta, China. It provides opportunities for significant social and economic development in that region for coming decades.Being a check-point to entering into Hong Kong from the HKZMB, Hong Kong Boundary Crossing Facilities (HKBCF) will be constructed on a 130-hectares of reclamation site to accommodate the Customs, Immigration and Quarantine facilities of Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. To reflect its importance and aim at constructing the HKBCF as a new landmark, an international design ideas competition was organized to draw new design ideas and to engage general public for the master layout plan of HKBCF and layout design of the Passenger Clearance Building. The winning designs in the Professional Group of the Competition will be taken as reference for the detailed design of the HKBCF.
For the Competition Document, entry form and details, please visit : http://www.hkbcf-design.hk
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
37th Annual IIDA Interior Design Competition
Submit: Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Together with Interior Design magazine, IIDA’s Annual Interior Design Competition honors outstanding design in all areas of practice: Corporate, Education/Institutional, Government, Healthcare, Hospitality, Residential and Retail/Showroom.
PURPOSE
To recognize and reward outstanding interior design, and to encourage new ideas and techniques in the design and furnishing of interior spaces.
WHO SHOULD ENTER
Any design professional practicing legally in their jurisdiction may submit entries. Truly international in scope, this competition is open to participants worldwide.
ENTRY REQUIREMENTS
Projects must have been completed after January 1, 2008.
JUDGING CRITERIA
Submissions will be judged for suitability of design to the project challenge, originality of the design solution, and the successful integration of interior finishes and furnishings. The winner is determined by a jury of design professionals. The jury reserves the right to not select a winner from the entries submitted for this competition.
AWARDS
All winners of the competition will be announced at IIDA’s NeoCon® celebration COOL. The winning projects may be published in the NeoCon issue of Interior Design magazine. In the event that a previously published entry is selected as a winner, Interior Design magazine reserves the right not to republish that project.
DEADLINES
Deadline to request entry kit: Wednesday, February 10th, 2010.
Deadline to submit completed entries: Wednesday, February 17th, 2010.
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
Restaurant & Bar Design Awards 2010
Totally independent, the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, now in it’s second year, is the only concept of its kind dedicated exclusively to design.
Judged by a highly influential panel of top international journalists from the design, hospitality and lifestyle sectors, the judges will recognise and reward both ‘restaurants and bars’ and their ‘designers’ for design excellence. With free online entry and a wide variety of categories, applicants and their projects receive extensive exposure, raising their profile for the duration of the competition and beyond.
The Restaurant & Bar Design Awards have rapidly established a distinguished following, attracting submissions from such high profile designers as Zaha Hadid, Karim Rashid, Kengo Kuma and David Collins in its first year.
Culminating in a unique and innovative awards ceremony, the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards’ winners, including the best designed restaurant and the best designed bar, will be announced and presented with their awards at Westfield Stratford in June 2010.
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
iF material award Register/Submit: Saturday, January 30, 2010
The iF material award is a competition for innovative materials, products and processes. The competition, presented for the fifth time in 2010, is open to manufacturers, designers, developers, design engineers and architects. As in previous years, a renowned jury of international experts will decide over the entries that can be entered in the categories materials, product and processes, to award the best with the highly desired iF label.
The iF material award provides an excellent platform for important new developments from the world of materials through the public jury at the CeBIT exhibition “design driving innovation”, the exhibition of all awarded entries at the exhibition “material TRENDS” presented at the Hannover Industrial Fair, the well visited online exhibition on the iF Website, the printed documentation of the award as well as the accompanying communication work by iF and the advertising materials provided to the winners.
The iF material award 2010 will furthermore lay a special focus on ecology and sustainability through a newly created evaluation criteria, to emphasize the importance of this topic.
Registration deadline - Early bird: November 13, 2009
Registration deadline - Regular: January 15, 2010
Registration deadline - Last Chance: January 30, 2010
Submission deadline: yet to be announced
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
International Competition: Intercommunal Territories and Small Towns
Submit: Monday, February 15, 2010
Public services, shops and jobs are found in the centres of small towns of less than 20,000 habitants and large villages for reasons connected with the history of urban development and town planning.
Small towns and village communities, where there is a strong potential for the quality-of-life with nature and national heritage, are areas where town planning and rurality can combine, respecting ecological constraints. Sustainable development in these territories will provide an alternative to the urban concentrations in large built-up areas.
Please note : Territories and project sites located in large built-up areas can be introduced in a proposal…
The purpose of these developments is to improve the quality and the attractiveness of the living environment in interurban areas. For example “a town centre” connected by “eco-friendly transport” to a ‘public square’ and to a ‘park’ … served by an intercommunal transport network provides an answer to these concerns. Based on these existing situations, any improvements made to the quality of life will highlight:
- That conditions of access to the urban centres are specific to each territory (i,e, coastline, mountain, plain, large built-up areas) and take into account the location of centres for employment, services and public amenities
- The use of new means of transport aiming to reduce or replace the use of the individual car
- Easy and safe use of the urban centre and its environment by ‘everyone’.
Quality of life will be evaluated using the three criteria in the ‘Referential for the quality of life’ with priority given to the respecting references below :
- architectural quality: improvements to facilitate access to public buildings and areas
- quality of community life : possibility of easier access to the urban centre for everyone
- respect of the environment : savings in parking areas and energy could be made, depending on the means of transport used.
The 2009-2010 discussion topic for the “Robert Auzelle seminar” is common to the national prize for elected representatives and professionals and the international competition for academics from all disciplines. The French ’eco-friendly transport’ vocabulary sheet for urban art along with other vocabulary sheets is a referential teaching aid.
- Competition Brief in English (PDF)
via ArtUrbain.fr
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Forget Sustainability, It’s Time to Talk Resilience
There’s a new concept infiltrating the climate change conversation, and it has the potential to change the conversation altogether. It’s time to give sustainability a rest and start talking about resilience, Rob Hopkins writes in Resurgence.
“The term ‘resilience’ is appearing more frequently in discussions about environmental concerns, and it has a strong claim to actually being a more successful concept than that of sustainability. Sustainability and its oxymoronic offspring sustainable development are commonly held to be a sufficient response to the scale of the climate challenge we face: to reduce the inputs at one end of the globalised economic growth model (energy, resources, and so on) while reducing the outputs at the other end (pollution, carbon emissions, etc.). However, responses to climate change that do not also address the imminent, or quite possibly already passed, peak in world oil production do not adequately address the nature of the challenge we face.”
The concept takes into account how systems can survive disturbances intact, and Hopkins says the framework is crucial to communities’ chances of thriving “beyond the current economic turmoil the world is seeing.”
via UTNE Reader
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Sydney, 2050+
Following WoHa Architects’ envisioning of a Singapore in their The Strange Times proposal as a part of DesignSingapore’s Design 2050 Studio, The Australian Institute of Architects has released the shortlisted Australian entries for the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale, based on the theme Ideas for Australian cities 2050+.
About 130 architects from across Australia submitted their solutions to the challenges of population growth and climate change, which have taken on new relevance after the heavily-criticised Copenhagen summit.
While some proposals, like Siph, envisions the city witnessing a mass migration to a futuristic underwater city - a metropolis of floating pods powered by ocean currents - other more grounded ideas include Edmond and Corrigan Architects’, from Melbourne, who suggest Australia’s swelling population could be accommodated in desert cities. The cities would be home to between 50,000 and half a million people and make use of the abundant opportunities for solar power.
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Why We Should Teach Design Early
Designers, through training and experience, develop a different lens through which to see the world. They move through spaces, environments, and systems, making observations and developing insights about what works well and what doesn’t. They then use those observations and insights to create innovative solutions for everyday problems. If design is the crossroads of beauty and purpose, design thinking is the intersection of creative and analytical thinking.
But when do we learn how to think like a designer?
In today’s world of standardized tests and performance-based educational funding, students are not evaluated on the way they approach a problem, but whether or not they come up with the right answer. What happens when there are many right answers, as is often the case with non-linear design solutions? When can we start teaching students how to creatively evaluate their ideas?
Design education typically begins at the college level, but if we wait until then to teach design thinking we are missing critical points in the growth of young minds, whose ability to think creatively is boundless. Teaching high school students to think like designers would help shape the way they look at the world around them and positively affect their future endeavors.
Inspired by these notions, a team of designers from the Austin studio of frog design got together and started an initiative called “TeachDesign.” The objective of this initiative is to expose high school students to design methodologies through immersive, real-world projects that have a lasting positive impact on the participating students, school, and community.
via designmind at GOOD Magazine
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Dubai’s urban planning “shoddy”
“Dubai just opened the ultimate trophy building — the world’s tallest skyscraper, which soars a neck-craning 2,717 feet into the air — but just try getting there from the airport.
Your polite, epaulette-wearing cabdriver screeches down a 12-lane highway and — with the tower in plain sight — he goes miles past it, leading you to wonder whether he’s lost his way or is ripping you off. Only when he finally reaches an interchange and then doubles back to the tower do you realize what’s going on: Dubai wins no medals for urban planning.”
The Chicago Tribune’s Blair Kamin hits the nail on the head again with insights on city planning in Dubai, taking examples such as the famous palm-shaped island that branches out from the mainland to prove his point. From the air, the islands are pure spectacle; once on the ground, “the fronds are packed with high-priced villas while the stemlike road leading to them is lined with monolithic rows of hulking apartment buildings (left). These look as though they were designed by architectural refugees from East Germany who added a few Islamic touches.”
And while urbanity is sorely lacking as Kamin scours the city, he is quick to dish out some alternative viewpoints however, praising the efforts of Dubai’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s willingness to invest in public transportation infrastructure that in some ways shines the light on the future for the rest of the desert city.
via Blair Kamin’s Cityscapes journal on The Chicago Tribune
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
International VELUX Award 2010 for Students of Architecture
Submit: Monday, May 03, 2010
The International VELUX Award 2010 for Students of Architecture wants to encourage and challenge students of architecture to explore the theme of daylight in its widest sense - and to create a deeper understanding of this specific and ever-relevant source of energy and light.
The award seeks to challenge the future of daylight in the built environment with an open-minded and experimental approach. The Award seeks to widen the boundaries of daylight in architecture, including aesthetics, functionality, sustainability, and the interaction between buildings and environment.
“Light of Tomorrow” is the overall theme of the award that celebrates and promotes excellence in completed study works from students all over the world.
- details via http://iva.velux.com/
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
The Land Art Generator Initiative Competition
The Land Art Generator Initiative is the artworld’s responsible answer to the question:
“what comes after oil?”
The long-term goal of the Land Art Generator Initiative is to design and construct a series of land art installations that uniquely combine aesthetic intrigue and artistic concept with clean energy generation. The LAGI viewing platforms will be tourist destinations, drawing people from around the world to experience the beauty of the collaborative artworks. At the same time, the art itself will continuously distribute clean energy into the electrical grid, with the sculptures having the potential to provide power to thousands of homes.
We are living in a world in which the climate is deeply affected by the burning of fossil fuels for energy generation and in which it is estimated by the oil industry that petroleum reserves will be mostly used up by the time children born today reach middle age.
So what can the art world do in order to stimulate change at an even faster pace? Why not create works of art that themselves provide clean, infinitely renewable energy to the world? These artworks can be large-scale installations related to the genre of land-art. They can be profound and lasting statements of purpose. Their message can reach across generations and continents.
The time is now to do whatever we can to make the shift to cleaner forms of energy. Art has the power to reach the hearts and the minds of the world, and it is this power that we must tap into if we are to see substantive change.
This open call to interdisciplinary teams is the first step in the process of inititating this change. The winning proposal will be the first in line to be constructed. Once completed, it will be the first of its kind in the world.
An exhibit of all qualified proposals will be held at the conclusion of the competition. This exhibit will provide a forum for a public presentation and discussion of all of the works. It is the intention of LAGI to have this exhibit travel to as many venues as possible in the time after the competition period in order to broaden the audience that is a part of the dialogue.
Proposals
The designs should be considered first and foremost as Land Art Installations. The considerations for energy generation should come in a close second. What this means is that the installations are art first, power plants second. There will most-likely be sacrifices to be made in terms of efficiency of energy generation in order that the design function primarily on a conceptual and aesthetic level. The objective is not to design and engineer a device that provides the cheapest KWh or the most energy per square meter of land.
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | Competitions
Open Source House Design Competition
Submit: Monday, May 17, 2010
Designing Sustainable Housing Together
Why?
Lower middle class in developing countries is rapidly growing and so is their demand for housing. A lack of affordable building materials and the use of inefficient construction methods are two of the reasons why houses are built in an unaffordable and unsustainable way. These houses have a short lifecycle, leaving behind unusable but costly materials and construction waste.
We think this can be changed
Contest:
Open Source House will start with a Design Competition at the 15th of January 2010. The challenge is to design an affordable, modular house according to 8 eco-architectural principles, which stimulate affordability, exchangeability and sustainability. The platform is the place where architects, building engineers, students professors etc. can come together to share their ideas with eachother. No Idea will be lost and every idea is available for everyone to implement them in their own country for free!
The best design will be awarded and realized in a pilot project in Ghana! Sign up for Design Competition and share your idea on the platform.
Open Source House
Affordable housing through sustainable design
For more information see http://www.os-house.org
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | News
“the designer of secular India”
Anuj Kumar from The Hindu offers a look at Raj Rewal, Indian architect and longstanding promoter of a coherent and harmonious development that is in sync with the climate and culture of place.
via The Hindu image by V.V. Krishnan
January 19, 2010 | Broadcast | News
Putting Trowulan into Perspective
Prominent Indonesian architect Yori Antar and a team comprising counterparts Adi Purnomo, Danny Witjaksono and several others from the architectural firm Han Awal and Partners – are set to oversee the design and construction of the Majapahit Information Center in the country’s largest archaeological site, Trowulan.
Antar’s team’s design proposes an open museum that creates viewing spaces in between the classic modern joint-and-strut system based on the excavation modules, amidst extreme urgency to mobilize an effort to shelter the open-brick structures that had been unearthed and are in danger of serious deterioration if not protected from weathering effects.
This follows controversy surrounding the initial design which had been commissioned, which saw concrete foundations driven blindy into what could be one of Indonesia’s most important archaeological troves.
Mentioned in Negarakertagama, an ancient script from the 14th century by Prapanca, the Trowulan compound is more than just a royal palace. Though the center of the complex is the red-brick palace, the overall heritage consists of a set of settlements buried under the volcanic debris of Mount Kelud.
Several landmarks that have been fully excavated are the Segaran Pool, Tikus Temple, the palace gate Bajang Ratu and the compound gate Wringin Lawang. Remains of brick floors and walls of houses, homes that already had proper wells and drains, are found outside the palace compound.
“We can learn a lot from what is left. Look at how they built brick by brick and applied a system of nailing and locking the structure,” Yori points out. “This is a very valuable heritage.”
- via Prodita Sabatini at The Jakarta Post
- more on Yori Antar
January 5, 2010 | Broadcast | News
a Singapore update
We get an eyeful of some of the newest work by local practices led by Ko Shiou Hee, Wong Mun Summ & Richard Hassell, Ong Ker Shing & Josh Comaroff to name but a few, in a slideshow put together by Daven Wu, writer and correspondent for Wallpaper. Of particular note was WoHa’s projective Strange Times, part of DesignSingapore’s Design 2050 Studios - created as a “gateway to the future” to hub a creative community to create future design propositions on various aspects of life in 2050 - which sets the island state in the year 2050 in times of rising sea levels and shortening fuel resources. While it is encouraging to see the innovative built work rising out of the ground, WoHa’s effort to put ideas to paper remind us of the kind of dreaming and foresight that architects of a previous generation used to do a lot more of, and how important it is for the profession to continue hypothesizing about the future of civilization, not the least through the medium of writing.
via Wallpaper, YouTube, DesignSingapore and ArchDaily via SlideShare
