Open Call: [Layer 02. City] more socially sustainable designs

Submission: September 18, 2022
Registration: September 04, 2022
Language: English
Location: Global
Prizes: Please see details below
Type: Open

As spatial practitioners, we are often presented with uncomfortable relationships, forcing us to choose sides and make decisions. We are constantly challenged to rethink how we embrace the dynamics between architecture, and external forces.

Ultimately, we envisage architecture as a tool to comment, critique, dismantle and reposition a condition. As it is secretly the dark fetish of a designer to wipe the slate clean, a tabula rasa, what if you were presented with a work-in-progress new city?

Hengqin Island is that city.

Hengqin was a sleepy, rural community on the other side of a narrow river across from the city turned world- class gambling Mecca after the local gaming license was liberalised. Located in Macau’s Cotai Strip, its location, along with social and physical up-coming advancements makes it an ideal place for architectural experimentation and exploration.

The unprecedented Covid-19 pandemic has dealt a serious blow to the gaming industry, prompting the Macau SAR, Guangdong and Hengqin to seek new paths for economic diversification.

Beyond the ‘2022 Development plan’, there are clearly physical and social gaps in its conception. Public infrastructures and the conveniences of life have forgotten; cast aside in favour of Layer 01: economic diversification.

Now that the Development Plan has settled, we ask that you, the designer: intervene to plug the gaps of the life it hasn’t yet accounted for.

Hengqin was planning to expand its cooperation with Macao to jointly develop logistics, tourism, finance, leisure, and cross-border e-commerce industries. With the upcoming proposal, Hengqin is destined to be adopted into a different way of life tha leads to an alienation from its own past.

As modern insertions embedded into Hengqin can be seen as impermanent, caught in a shorter life cycle of constant change, the city can be viewed as placing strain on its collected historical anchors in favour of an architecture which responds to only its immediate economic and environmental needs, dismantles, and creates again.

As these object forms nested in the permutations of city’s field conditions, the city is capable of unifying diverse and seemingly disparate elements while still respecting the identity of each. The swampy chaos of the “sea” with its inhabitants: parks, pop-up events, spill outs, and bits of small urbanization, collectively reside in the infrastructure, namely streets, roads and rail.

It is with Art as it is with Architecture, exists Horror Vacui, an intense and irrational fear of empty, wide open spaces. Seemingly made up of nothingness, of pure space, often alluded to but never defined, closer inspection reveals a collection of objects and urban scenarios which give identity to moments of place within the circulating swampy chaos space of the city.

What is to buffer this speeding devlopment of Hengqin, which was once frozen in time? How will the changes be obscured, evolved and accepted? How might architects evolve this morphogenesis?

Submission guide

6 DRAWINGS + 500 WORDS
Submit six drawings (Isometric drawings of different scales x 2)
Drawings of your choice x 3
Render of the best perspective x 1
1-minute fly-through animation (it’s optional)
Approximately 500 words in word/pdf/txt text file explaining your design concept with a title for the design

Winner categories

THE BEST OVERALL PROJECT – 1500 EURO
THE BEST RESEARCH – 200 EURO
THE BEST TECHNICAL DESIGN – 200 EURO
THE BEST ANIMATION – 200 EURO
THE BEST ISO – 100 EURO
THE BEST RENDER – 100 EURO

Schedule

Early Bird Entry 50 € (01 May to 31 May)
Standard Entry 75 € (01 June to 15 August)
Last-minute Entry 100 € (16 August to 04 Sept)

Early Bird Entry Deadline – 31st May 2022 – 11:59pm (GMT)
Standard Entry Deadline – 15th August 2022 – 11:59pm (GMT)
Last-minute Entry Deadline – 04th Sept 2022 – 11:59pm (GMT)
Submission Deadline – 18th September 2022 – 11:59pm (GMT)
Public Vote – Mid October 2022
Evaluation Period – Late October 2022
Announcement of Winners – Early November 2022