competitions – mammoth // building nothing out of something

Tag Archives: competitions

north coast design competition

[Map of annual dredging volumes in American cities in the Great Lakes Basin, via Matthew Moffitt’s project “Dredge City”, which won the 2013 ASLA Student Award of Excellence in General Design.] The city of Toledo is the epicenter of dredging on the Great Lakes: of the roughly three million cubic yards of material dredged in […]

dry commonwealths

[The eighty-six proposed “commonwealths” of the lower forty-eight states, from “The Commonwealth Approach”.] 1 I can’t take too much credit for our win — we borrowed the main idea from a pair of earlier competition entries Laurel produced. I’m excited that “The Commonwealth Approach”, an entry to the Arid Lands Institute’s Drylands Design Competition that […]

emergency interventions

[One of the five sites for OPPTA’s 2012 competition, “El Monton”, “an accumulation of stratified waste classified as public space” by the city of Lima, in the impoverished riverbank neighborhood Márgen Izquierda del Río Rímac; images via OPPTA.] OPPTA, the “observatorio panamericano”, is holding an international ideas competition under the theme of “emergency interventions”, looking […]

backyard farm service

[Plant compatibility diagram, from Visual Logic’s “Backyard Farm Service.] One of the unfortunate things that happens with competitions is that the best entries are often overlooked by the judges, and the ideas encapsulated in those entries then missed.  There are notable exceptions to this rule, like the OMA entry to the Parc de la Villette […]

mine the gap

Via Pruned and elsewhere, the Chicago Architectural Club has just launched a spring competition, “Mine the Gap”, which holds a great deal of promise: …at a moment when the global recession has either slowed or frozen completely the driving forces that had propelled architecture and urbanism over the past decades. The bursting of the realestate […]

burnham’s centennial

Infrastructurist has a round-up of some of the projects selected by Chicago to commemorate the centennial anniversary of Burnham and Bennett’s Plan of Chicago. The projects, roughly themed as “big”, “bold”, and “visionary”, are organized into six categories: big plans, catalysts, public spaces, the lake front, towers, and transportation. Notable winners include Urbanlab’s plan to […]

wpa 2.0

Its taken me a few days to notice it (because both Stephen and I’ve been on mini-vacations from the internet), but the winners of WPA 2.0 contest have been announced. “Urban Beach”, from Darina Zlateva and Takuma Ono’s winning entry, “Hydro-Genic City, 2020” The six winners propose harvesting biofuels from pools of algae fed by […]

burn down the suburbs, and other comments on reburbia

Though I’m on vacation at the moment, I thought I’d chime in with a couple comments on our reburbia entry (posted by Stephen below) and perhaps articulate more fully some of the thoughts behind it: 1. We were as interested in articulating a series of comments on the relationship between designers and suburbia as we […]

mammoth suburban land infusions

Here is a little something Rob and I put together for the Re-burbia competition.  Our entry asks the questions: What if the challenge suburbs face is not that they over-consume land, but have too little? How could an infusion of new land simultaneously (and paradoxically) mitigate some of the issues caused by the under-utilization of […]

cloud skippers

Studio Lindfors, who previously proposed blimps as an inflatable emergency extension of the metropolis for the What if New York City… design competition, speculate further about the inhabitation of the air in their entry to [bracket], “Cloud Skippers”: Imagine a community of adventurous pioneers who leave the Earth’s surface to drift and glide amongst the […]