d3 HOUSING TOMORROW 2015

Exploration of contextual, cultural, and life cycle flows offers a critical lens for visualizing new housing strategies for living in the future. The d3 Housing Tomorrow competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.

Established in 2010, the annual d3 Housing Tomorrow competition has grown to become a leading voice in alternative residential architecture and one of the most notable international awards in speculative, performance-based housing design. The d3 Housing Tomorrow competition for 2015 invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects. The competition calls for transformative solutions that advance sustainable thought, building performance, and social interaction through study of intrinsic environmental geometries, social behaviors, urban implications, and programmatic flows. Special emphasis may be placed on housing concepts that investigate dialogues including engagement of internal/external socio-economic diversity, change/adaptability over time, public/private spatial connectivity, and permanence/impermanence of materials.

d3 challenges participants to rethink strategies for investigating residential design from macro-to-micro scales ranging from urban—promoting broader physical interconnectivity; communal—exploiting an interaction of units with shared facilities; and internal—examining the interior particularity of the unit, individual, or family in housing design toward promoting identity, ownership, and intimacy. An architecture of emergence suggests that design expression requires purpose beyond formal assumption and aesthetic experimentation itself. Concurrent with sustainable thought, the d3 Housing Tomorrow competition assumes that architecture does not simply form, but rather perform various functions beyond those conventionally associated with residential buildings. Accordingly, design submissions must be environmentally responsible while fostering inventive conceptual living solutions for today and tomorrow. Although proposals should be technologically feasible, they may suggest fantastical architectural visions of a sustainable residential future.