
The Rotterdam Design Award started its 2009 application period, deadline is 8 of May.

The Rotterdam Design Award started its 2009 application period, deadline is 8 of May.

Since the devastating fire that consumed the notorious architecture faculty at the TU Delft in 2008, the architectural community in the Netherlands has been holding their breadth to find out what their new faculty would look like. The open international ideas competition has recently closed, and the TU Delft is planning to launch the project winners at the NAi in the coming weeks.
On March 14th at the NAi, the award winners and mentions will be announced and a debate held to discuss the work. The museum will simultaneous open an exhibition documenting the work that will run until the 7th June 2009. In total 466 entries came from 50 countries, and the competition organizers will publish a monograph of the work this May.
OMA announced on Tuesday that 50 of their 300 employees have to leave. Business Director van de Chijs comments that he expects OMA to survive the economical crisis as business is going well. But as they intend to be “terribly careful” the diceded on the lay-offs.
In related news OMA announces the same day that they won the competition to build the Taipei Performing Arts Centre (as widely reported). Have also a look at the very interesting runner-up by Abalos+Sentkiewicz.
Read on for more pictures and the press release of the OMA design. Continue reading ‘OMA fires 50, wins Taipei competition’
Indeed, the ultimate aim of the European vision of the city is to make society, in other words to bring together people of all conditions and origins. However, the dominant trend towards individualisation, the quest for autonomy, cannot be ignored. This is precisely the contradiction that Europan addresses: on the one hand wanting the city – i.e animation, communal life, people – and on the other side wanting intimacy, privacy, home and the immediate circle.
Europan launched the tenth session of their young architects’ competition series yesterday. This year’s topic is inventing urbanity : regeneration, revitalization, colonization.
Whereas the subtopics make sense, the title appears to be far-fetched. Do we need to ‘invent’ urbanity? The principles of urban life are well understood since the first criticism of modern planning had been advanced.
On the other hand I welcome that the recent Europan sessions (‘European Urbanity: Sustainable City and New Public Space’) are much more concerned with density and the urban condition than earlier issues (‘New Housing Landscape’, ‘In-between Cities’). This year’s brief emphasizes equally social and ecological issues.
Participation is limited to the young (i. e. under 40) architect who has 62 competition sites to choose from – 12.000€ for the winner, 6.000€ for the runner-up. The sites are grouped into 3 subtopics –
those that must undergo a strong transformation (regeneration), those that must both keep their identity and redynamise their programme (revitalization) and those that must undergo a development (colonization).
UPDATE: I have put together an overview table of all the competition sites for easy comparison (pdf):
UPDATE II: Check out the hard-to-find page with the registration statistics. Typical diploma projects come out on top, as of 8th of march 101 registrations for Dunkerque, a harbour pier transformation.
MVRDV and co-architect ADEPT have just released images of their winning entry for the Rødovre Skyscraper Competition in Denmark. The tower reaches to 116m and is a mixed-use programme of appartments, hotel, retail and offices. We are aiming for more images very soon.
Continue reading ‘MVRDV’s Sky Village – Winning Skyscraper Competition Entry – Updated’
I am wrapping things up here at maxwan architects & urbanists, as tomorrow is going to be my last day. I will be teaching urbanism at a private university in Aleppo (google maps) in a week.
We have achieved quite a bit recently – not only did we launch our new maxwan website, but we also won the competition for the design of 2009′s Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam (IABR). The motto of next year’s Biennale is ‘Open City’, a term Kees Christiaanse (the Biennale’s Curator) has been working with for a while. Maxwan translates this idea spatially by turning the NAi inside out. Continue reading ‘Maxwan News’
This friday at 16:30 an interesting exhibition opens @ the Casla in Almere. It will feature the winning projects of the Eenvoud Competition, the third edition for an experimetal neighbourhood in Almere. Its predecessors, “De Fantasie” and “De Realiteit”, ‘Fantasy’ and ‘Reality’ were held back in the eighties and their results are still worth an excursion. More information on that below.
“De Éénvoud” or ‘Simplicity ‘is the result of a competition held in 2006. The brief was to design a freestanding and simple low-cost house, expressing their own wishes and ideas for dwelling. The winners got the possibility to build their design on a beautiful open spot in the woodland of Noorderplassen-West.
Continue reading ‘De Eenvoud – Simplicity’
Supersudaca, a befriended south-american think-tank has launched Sudapan – Endless(s)trips, an international competition about the urban potentials of mass-tourism in the Caribbean. The competition focuses on the 140km resorts-strip of Riviera Maya, on the Mexican coast.
The competition tries to put forward of the key territorial issues of Latin America and the Caribbean for their inclusion in the contemporary global agenda. Endless(s)trips is a competition of ideas about the urbanism potential of the massive beach tourism in the Caribbean.
Endless(s)trips is a space of reflection an proposals for rethinking the relation between the local elements, the tourists, the environment, tourism managers, the State, the infrastructure and the landscape. It is an opportunity to imagine other cities, other territories and other ways of tourism management.
Due to its size, dynamism and complexity, the Mayan Riviera is an intense and urgent case of great potential, an urbanism laboratory in the Caribbean coast.
Endless(s)trips is supported of the IAAC (Advanced Architecture Institute of Catalunya) and sponsored by Prins Claus Fonds.
* Tourist strips are the mono functional strips of tourism activity developed along the coast line.
Jury
Vicente Guallart (Valencia, Spain, 1963)
Winy Maas (Schijndel, The Netherlands, 1959)
Prof. Carel Weeber (Nijmegen,The Netherlands, 1937)
José Castillo (Mexico)
Bruno Stagno (Santiago, Chile)
Full explanation is available at www.sudapan.org. Feel free to contact info@supersudaca.org for more information. Anyway, make sure you check out their slideshow on the type of ‘urbanism’, created by all-inclusive tourism.
UN Studio and MVRDV (in collaboration with the spanish office GRAS) have recently sent us their competiton entries for the Ciudad del Motor in Spain, which has been won by the widely published, but less interesting fish-shaped design by Foster.
UN Studio’s design is a continuous dynamic form, a structure ducking to the ground with a motor-sport aesthetic, reminding of the visual language of an BMW ad. MVRDV’s proposal is a group of buildings – blocks breaking from the ground in a sandy desert, creating an ensemble of squares. Where UN Studio’s design is a new object in the landscape, MVRDV’s design forms part of it. More of a place, less of an object. You can download MVRDV’s project PDF, complete with sections and plans (Thank you, Oana!) here:
Convergence towards movie architecture and science fiction stage sets. Read more about it at dezeen, see all hi-res images at spaceportamerica.
Stichting Spangmaker announced a small open competition to link the Rotterdam neighbourhood of Spangen better to the van Nelle ‘Design Factory’ (a gem of modernism, worth a closer look anyhow!). 1st prize: 10.000€, deadline 18th october.