Future Architecture Call for Ideas: Landscapes of Care

Future Architecture Call for Ideas is more than a competition; it’s a platform, providing practitioners and conceptual thinkers with the opportunity to express their ideas and to be both seen and heard. A successful application would mean the opportunity to begin exchanging your projects and proposals with peers from all over the world, as well as with high-profile institutions including museums, galleries, publishing houses, biennials and festivals, all to assist you with finding avenues toward international recognition. Apply, and let the Future Architecture platform support you in elevating and sharpening your practice.

This year, we are inviting multi-disciplinary emerging professionals from all over the globe to apply with transformative projects related to our built environments. Send us your completed projects, your theoretical or conceptual propositions for spatial, social or cultural innovation, and join our discussion about the Landscapes of Care.

We welcome projects that address systemic change (prototypes and systems), site-specific cases (projects customized and adapted for certain contexts and tasks) and new alliances (cross-, trans- and multi-disciplinary projects exploring new design processes and methodologies).

Landscapes of Care

Contemporary societies face dynamically changing challenges. The extractive and consumptive logics of the system create globalised issues, impacting different regions in real time. Geopolitical boundaries protect economic returns above and beyond protecting social interests while the recent pandemic spreads, and new territories and ecologies are rearranged according to logics of migration which are inextricably connected to the flow of financial wealth. Confronting this scenario, new regional initiatives question political divisions and corporate interests. Fluid boundaries traced by local organisers and citizens emerge to fill the spaces as yet un-commodified by the free market; spaces of exception free from the control of policy. The flow of persons generates new modes of neighbourhood living and political commitments that demand care, empathy and awareness of the other.

The recent health crisis has challenged entire societies, demonstrating how they can effectively, rapidly and mostly peacefully take action. Designers, architects and urbanists see themselves handling social and political issues, rather than simply the spatial and formal aspects of a project; facing up to the challenge of transforming decades of self-complacency into active practices dealing with the politics of relations, of local communities, of energy flows, and of ever-changing urban dynamics.

“Landscapes of Care”, the theme proposed by dpr-barcelona, chosen by the members of FA platform and further developed with CAFx, for the 2021 edition of Future Architecture Platform will explore the dynamics of solidarity and collective self-organisation, the networks of trust working at the neighbourhood scale, and transitional common spaces and activities. The edition aims to trigger dialogues around the challenges of a society facing up to the myths of endless growth, the glorification of borders and national identity, and the hardships labelled as austerity by capitalism.

Timetable and Deadlines

• Publication of the Call for Ideas: 17 November 2020
• Deadline for submitting applications: 6 January 2021
• Announcement of the selected 25 ideas: 15 January 2021
• Creative Exchange: 17–19 February 2021
• European Architecture Program: 1 March – 31 October 2021

Eligibility

The call is open to emerging architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, engineers, artists, curators, people involved in architectural communication and anyone whose professional work is focused on the future of architecture and living environments.
To be eligible as an emerging creative for the Future Architecture Platform, applicants must meet the following criteria:

• The applicant’s independent work(s) related to architecture or city development must have been created after graduation and within the last two years;
• The applicant must have publicly presented or published their independent work(s);
• The applicant must not yet have attained recognition through the publication of a body of critically recognized work, or through the work of major and/or established institutions;
• The applicant must not have participated in previous Future Architecture Platform activities;
• The applicant may be an individual or a collective.

The open call starts at 12.00 am CET on 17 November 2020, and all entries must be received by 6 January 2021. Multiple entries are permitted as an individual or as a collective.

>>> Go to the competition’s website <<<