DEADLINE 15 July - THE MID-POLIS, 2011 Open Building Competition Challenge

THE MID-POLIS
The 2011 Open Building Competition Challenge

The competition provides a unique opportunity for future architects to challenge conventional approaches to design, and to investigate and develop new concepts for an open and sustainable architecture for the 21st century.

This is an open competition with limited restrictions. It is intended to challenge students, working individually or in teams, to explore a variety of design issues related to open building principles in an urban context. All current students are elegible to participate, including students earning their degrees during the 2010-2011 academic year.

The Design Challenge
As metropolises around the world continue to mature, the zones between their inner (historic) core and their outer (suburban) fringe evolve and mutate in many forms. This mid-polis condition represents a fruitful opportunity to re-define urban connections between center and edge. With that in mind, we have selected a site that is ripe for such a new intervention. The site is located in Somerville, Massachusetts, an “inner suburb” also closely tied to the City of Boston through history, future transit connections and existing infrastructure. This is the context for the competition challenge.

The competition asks entrants to consider how familiar and new urban patterns and building typologies can serve to redefine this mid-polis site. The selected urban pattern and building types for this site will face significant challenges in the 21st century. They must be at the same time stable, lovable, energy effective infrastructures of space and form, adaptable to inevitable changes of use or function. How will the proposed urban morphology and building types support changing programmatic, economic and societal forces over time while maintaining a coherent built form that does not become functionally and stylistically obsolete in 30 – 50 years? Thus, the key issue in this competition is the design of an urban fabric and more detailed design of one building type of enduring quality – so excellent that over 50 or more years, the uses and functions in the urban spaces and inside the buildings can change as cells are replenished in a living organism. That is the design challenge.

Awards
Winning entries will be awarded monetary prizes and stipends for travel and will be recognized during the conference. The Eberle Open Building Award will recognize the competition winner, and the Sunty Open Building Award recognizes the second prize
winner.

- The Eberle Open Building Award (First Prize): $3000
- The Sunty Open Building Award (Second Prize): $2000
- Third Prize: $750
- Two Citations: $250 each

All student prize- and citation winners will be offered an $800 stipend to help cover the costs of attending the conference should they decide to attend. In addition to the stipend, student prize-winners attending the conference may attend all lectures and conference sessions without paying the conference fees. See ‘Distribution of Awards’ later in this document for information regarding the travel stipend and the distribution of award money in the case of team entries.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: July 15

FInd out more at the competition's website here