How to Participate in Competition Archi? | Complete Guide – Competitions.archi
Participating in architecture competitions is a meaningful activity that is integral to university studies and an architecture professional career. There are many benefits that come from facing this type of challenge. Starting from getting knowledge and gaining experience, through learning time management or collaboration skills, finishing on the possibility of being awarded as well as getting appreciation in the architecture world. But, no pain, no gain. Participating in an architecture competition is a long and very demanding process that requires devoted commitment.
The aims of participating in these competitions include promoting creativity, encouraging research, and inspiring new design solutions among young architects and designers. In this article, we would like to explain how the “competitions world” works, how to choose the most suitable challenge, and start your first entry as well.
Moreover, we would like to help you organize your work and give tips that will make your presentation boards stand out. Following the steps below, you will be able to improve every submission and increase your chances of winning the competition. So, let’s get started!
01 Introduction to Competitions
The world of architecture is constantly evolving, with innovative ideas and designs emerging every day. Architecture competitions have become a crucial platform for young architects to showcase their talent and skills, providing them with the opportunity to participate in international architecture competitions and contribute to a sustainable future. These competitions aim to inspire creativity and innovation in architectural design, pushing the boundaries of what is possible. By participating in architecture competitions, designers can gain valuable knowledge and insights, stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies, and demonstrate their expertise to potential clients and partners.
02 Benefits for Participants
Participating in architecture competitions can have numerous benefits for young architects and designers. It provides a stage for them to showcase their work, gain recognition, and build their portfolio. Competitions also offer a unique opportunity for participants to learn from others, discover new ideas, and improve their skills. Moreover, winning a competition can be a significant boost to one’s career, providing a competitive edge in the job market and opening up new opportunities for collaboration and partnerships. By joining architecture competitions, participants can become part of a global community of innovative and creative individuals who are shaping the future of architecture and design.
03 Opportunities for Young Architects
Architecture competitions provide a platform for young architects to demonstrate their talent and skills, and to gain recognition in the industry. These competitions offer a range of opportunities, from designing sustainable buildings to creating innovative public spaces. By participating in competitions, young architects can gain valuable experience, build their network, and stay up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies in architectural design. Moreover, competitions can provide a unique opportunity for young architects to work with experienced professionals, learn from their insights, and gain valuable feedback on their work. Whether you’re a student or a recent graduate, architecture competitions can be a great way to kick-start your career and make a name for yourself in the industry.
04 Choose the Most Suitable Architecture Competition
With so many architecture competitions out there, it can be challenging to choose the most suitable one for your needs and interests. When selecting a competition, consider the theme, location, and requirements, as well as the judging criteria and prizes. Look for competitions that align with your values and goals, and that provide a platform for you to showcase your skills and creativity. You can also search for competitions on social media platforms like Instagram, or read articles and publications to stay informed about upcoming events. By choosing the right competition, you can maximize your chances of success and make the most of this valuable opportunity.
05 Individually or in a Team?
When participating in architecture competitions, one of the key decisions you’ll need to make is whether to work individually or as part of a team. Both options have their advantages and disadvantages, and the right choice will depend on your personal preferences, skills, and goals. Working individually can provide an opportunity for you to take full control of the project, make all the decisions, and receive full credit for your work. On the other hand, working in a team can provide a platform for collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and mutual support, and can be a great way to learn from others and build your network. Ultimately, the choice between working individually or in a team will depend on your individual circumstances, and what you hope to achieve from the competition. By considering your options carefully, you can make an informed decision that works best for you.
01 Choose the most suitable architecture competition
Types of competitions
What you need to know at the beginning is that there are many types of competitions that could be called architecture ones. The first group includes architecture concept competitions. Those are challenges demanding from the participants thinking outside the box and seeking for the most innovative solutions. The idea is the crucial thing, and its graphical expressions should be readable from the first sight. Secondly, competitions with building-award. While taking part in this type, it is important to explain, apart from the main idea, how the structure works, what materials were used for construction and finishing, how the design influences the surrounding. Furthermore, there are rendering challenges where contestants should focus on the frame, colors, composition, and atmosphere that are supposed to tell the story about the design. There are also architecture writing competitions. This type enables participants to share their thoughts about phenomena in contemporary architecture, express new ideas and thesis, and ways they think about architecture.
There is an enormous amount of architecture competition available on the market. The first step is to realize what is the most interesting aspect of architecture for you at this moment. Would you like to join a competition that will be focused on sustainability, maybe you would prefer proposing a solution for sociological issues or help in renovation by bringing second life to the ruined buildings? What types of building do you simply like designing? Do you feel better working on housing areas or places for exhibitions?
Engaging students in these competitions is crucial as it bolsters their development and inspires innovative thinking in urban planning and design.
Competition organizers
After answering those questions, you can visit all competition section on Competitions.Archi website, where you can find all recently released competitions with short descriptions and direct links to the competitions’ homepages. You can also check the following competitions organizers.
- BEE BREEDERS
- Non Architecture
- Archstorming
- Kaira Looro Architecture Competition
- ARKxSITE
- Quechua Architecture Competition
- YOUNG ARCHITECTS COMPETITIONS
02 Individually or in a team?
The next decision that needs to be made is choosing people to collaborate with. Inclusive design competitions often invite a diverse range of creative individuals, including designers, artists, and architects, to contribute innovative ideas. When you work with others you can exchange your thoughts easily. Once said idea, might be developed by another team member or rejected. Cooperation with colleagues limits the possibility of getting stuck. Finally, it enables sharing the work. As a result, you will not have to do everything on your own. One people are better in rendering, the others in drawing or making sketches. You can divide tasks in a way that everybody will do things he/she is the best of. Taking advantages of individual skills, your work will be very efficient and the final outcome – the most effective. On the other hand, setting meeting together might be found sometimes very difficult. Working with other requires making compromises as well.
Innovative architectural approaches can transform conventional practices, inspiring designers to rethink strategies and create impactful environments.
For those who feel underestimated by the teammates or would like to try their own chances, we recommend participating in the architecture competition individually.
03 Time management
A proper time management is a key to a successful submission. You might find establishing some collaboration rules at the beginning very helpful. It’s good to know how many hour during the week you can spend on designing process and organize some regular meetings to monitor the effects weekly. Some of you could plan stages of the process, for example by giving the deadlines to particular tasks and establishing the goals for each week. You make sure that every member of the group know exactly what should be done before next meeting. And finally, no matter how regularly you work, you will need extra time for “the last” changes and improvements. Our advice is to take at least one day off before the submission closing to focus only on the competition. As a result, you will submit the best possible entry.
Remember, many architecture and design competitions offer promotional discounts until April 21st, providing time-sensitive opportunities to engage with the platform and join ongoing contests.
Participating in these competitions not only allows you to showcase your innovative ideas but also benefits from effective marketing strategies that enhance visibility and engagement within the architecture community.
04 Searching for ideas
The main idea is the essential aspect of the project. Looking through many winning submissions, we could see that they have one thing in common – a strong leading idea visible on every drawing or visualization, which makes the whole project consistent. But, how to know which idea is “the one”? How to find the right one?
If you do not have anything that comes to your mind at the beginning, start looking for inspirations. It can be anything – wining submission from the previous edition, movie you have already seen, book you have read. For example, winners of eVolo 2020 found their winning idea during playing a video game called Hideo Kojima’s Death Stranding and the short visualization of communication tower inspired them.
You can look for inspiration on Pinterest or Instagram, visiting Competitions.Archi Profiles. You will get there enormous amount of architecture presentation boards with short descriptions that may open your mind. You can also very carefully search for winnings submissions from the previous editions of the competition and try to understand what made them win.
You can go further and do research about the context and cultural background of the designing area. Reading the Chinese myth of Pangu was the first step for Mograph studio to win Xi’an Train Station Competition organized by Young Architects Competition. It started their process of form finding which brought them awards and recognition.
It might be also helpful to sit with your teammates around one table and manage brainstorming sessions. The most important rule is to stay open to every idea and give it chance to grow. Try to write down all associations you have with the topic and maybe one of them will be a key to your success. Maybe, it will become a main theme or title determining the whole designing process.
Continuing to collaborate and share ideas can lead to innovative solutions and a stronger project overall.
05 Making presentation boards stand-out
Everything we draw as architects needs to be functional as well as simply beautiful. Graphical expression is a very important part of final submission. There are plenty of well-designed and organized projects, but your panels need to be outstanding to be chosen as the winning ones. The submission needs to be extraordinary to be noticed by the jury, and very often the brilliant idea is not enough. Having the right resources, including tools and materials, is crucial to elevate your project. Below you can find some tips on how to enrich your presentation boards.
Leveraging the right strategies and tools is essential for presenting unique designs effectively and standing out from the competition.
Prepare presentation boards layout
It is important to make the board clear and readable. When jury has to analyze your project too long, there is little chance for success. If you submit more than one presentation board, make sure that all panels are consistent and look like one whole. You can check also previous years editions to see what types of layout are preferable by the competition’s organizers. What you need to remember is that the whole board needs to look like a designed and think-through composition, where blocks with drawings and visualizations suit each other. Make selection of drawings. When you work a lot on the design, it is natural that you want to show as many aspects of the project as you can. Unfortunately, it leads to the effect that the project board starts looking overfilled and unclear. The solution is to choose drawings you are the most satisfied with and include them as the main ones.
Competitions.Archi prepared Project Board Template Pack that includes 20 awarded presentation panels in competitions launched in last years. Clicking on the banner o the left you can download 20 different architecture representation templates in InDesign and Photoshop formats absolutely for FREE. There are 10 landscape and 10 portrait layouts that you can modify and adjust to your design.
Making main idea visible
The good idea is to create color palette at first and stick to this during creating graphics. You will also need to find the way to show the best what is the project about. Very often you can use a contrast color to underline the most important aspects of the design. Entitle your project in a way that will make the readers curious and give them a hint what it might be the concept behind. You can also prepare a big-size visualization showing the atmosphere the architecture might be creating. Drawing diagrams might help to understand your design as well. Creating functional diagrams enables jury to figure out how the building would work. You can explain using step-by-step diagrams what were the stages of form finding process. Sometimes it is very important to show the correlation with the existing buildings and urban diagrams are adequate type of drawings to do so.
Visualizations and framing
Not only the presentation board layout should create the composition itself but also frames of the visualization or pictures supposed to be carefully adapted. Creating architecture visualization you should thing what kind of emotion you want to transmit to the spectators. The picture needs to illustrate the atmosphere inside the building, make character of the architectural piece as well as encourage jury to explore the design more. The composition is the frame of the image and how the elements of the scene appear in it, is a guideline that must be observed when telling stories visually. The Fairy Tales Competition Winners shown us the way they compose their visualizations. They use symmetrical, asymmetrical composition to achieve different goals. Their methods of composing are describe in details in article called ‘How we won that competition? | Fairy Tales 2020 – The Year Without a Winter’.
Importance of 3d views
Recently we can see the tendency that standard 2d drawings are replaced by axonometric views or perspectives. Drawing axonometry is a perfect way to show special relations and the scale of the building. Perspectives and rendering enable us to express the atmosphere, the materials used and can make different impressions to the viewers.
Submission
To make your work eligible you need to meet all competition requirements. So make sure that there is no identification sign except of registration number. Before submitting, check the spelling of every headline and make sure that there is everywhere graphical scale, which helps in understanding the size and volume of the design better than the numerical scale. Be certain if every drawing is updated and in final version. Make sure that nothing is moved accidentally and everything is in established order.
06 What to do when you become a winner?
Firstly, Celebrate! Secondly, tell the world you made it, share it on your social media and let Competititons.Archi know about it.
If you are interested how to win an architecture competition and learn real stories written by the authors about their awarded submissions, check our annual publication – Architecture Competitions Yearbook. Understanding the software used in these winning projects can provide valuable insights into the tools and technologies integral to the design process. This book is perfect for you if you want to know:
- What’s the secret behind winning submissions?
- What makes a good project?
- How to create an innovative solution to the given problem?
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