d3 invites architects, designers, engineers and students to collectively explore the potential of nature-based influences in architecture, design and industry.
The format and expected outcomes of international competition have been left intentionally open, with categories suggesting responses could be urban, architectural, industrial or interior -or anything else for that matter, with a stricter strategy aimed at the methodology of the submissions.
Proposing a form of 'design-research', the competition challenges competitors to create "innovative proposals that advance sustainable thought and performance through the study of intrinsic environmental geometries, behaviors, and flows. By identifying, examining, and applying their structural order on form and function- -bottom-up, performance-based solutions for limitless building typologies, functional programs, and material conditions may be realized."
Before you start tracing butterfly wings, or mapping the metamorphosis of a bug, the organisers are (thankfully) keen to remind entrants of the methodology being deployed here: "An architecture of emergence suggests that design expression requires purpose beyond formal assumption and aesthetic experimentation itself. Concurrent with sustainable thought, the d3 Natural Systems Competition assumes that architecture does not simply form, but rather perform various functions beyond those conventionally associated with buildings. "
Sounds promising, although the rhetoric does seem slanted to the creation of
artefacts, additions, new-things, (especially by dropping in "environmental geometries") rather then keeping an open eye and ear to alternatives - infrastructural (say 'ecologies'?), social (biological), and other analogous (to 'environmental') conditions like extinction (demolition, excavation, etc)... but then I suppose I'm complicit in reading into 'geometry' in a materialistic way.
d3 2009 Sustainable Worldwide Winner. Urban Agriculture - London
Anyway, it's a good ideas competition (they don't come all that often with a bit of money attached), and NZ can definitely offer some unique and highly regarded expertise on the matter, I reckon.
Submissions are due July 5, 2010.
Inquiries to naturalsystems@d3space.org
Registration and competition information here:
www.d3space.org/competitions/