Exploration of housing typologies reveals vast the potential of overlaying urban, contextual, cultural, social, and life cycle flows toward determining new architectonic strategies for 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.

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 realm connectivity, and permanence/impermanence of materiality. 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.

Zerofootprint is an organization dedicated to a mass reduction in global environmental impact. They provide software and services to individuals, governments, universities, and corporations that measures and manages carbon footprint and engages employees and citizens worldwide in combating climate change.

The ZEROprize

Zerofootprint is offering the ZEROprize to the design team who can take an older concrete high-rise structure* and, using re-skinning along with other retrofitting technologies, reduce its carbon, water, and energy footprint to net zero while also maintaining the highest architectural design standards. To secure the ZEROprize, a candidate building will be required to have a net zero footprint for one year.

International Competition: Ideas and Concepts on the proposed project of “Bruce Lee’s Residence” at No.41 Cumberland Road, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong.

Purpose of Competition: To invite ideas for restoring the late Mr. Bruce Lee's former residence and optimising the use of space of the property and to engage the community in the restoration project, with a view to converting the residence to a tourism attraction.

Details on competition website: http://www.bruceleeresidence.com

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The French Ministry of Culture and Communication (Direction of Architecture and Heritage - DAPA) and the International Union of Architects announce a joint initiative aimed at enhancing and expanding their web index of 20th century architectural heritage: http://www.archi.fr/UIA/ .

This project focuses on an international student competition for digital representations of landmark 20th century buildings. The competition will be run entirely through the Internet.

An initial national competition will be carried out by the UIA Member Sections and the winners of the national selections will be submitted to the international jury.The panoramas and 3D models designed for this competition will be based on digital photographs and developed using the Autodesk software 'Autodesk® ImageModeler™' and 'Autodesk® Stitcher™'. This software will be made available to the participants free of charge for a period of three months.

The competition will be launched during the European celebration of Architectural Heritage Days, organised by the Minister of Culture and Communication on 19 & 20 September 2009.

Use your photographic skills to CAPTURE FUTURISTIC IMAGES of BUILDINGS OR STRUCTURES that feature concrete predominantly in their design, and you could win up to Twenty Thousand Rand.

View Competition Website: http://www.npcfocus.co.za/

On the occasion of Frank Lloyd Wright's birthday, June 8, the Guggenheim Museum and Google launched Design It: Shelter Competition, a global, online initiative that invites the public to use Google Earth and Google SketchUp to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters for a location of their choice anywhere on Earth.

The competition takes its inspiration from Learning By Doing, an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum's Sackler Center for Arts Education, which features plans, photographs, and models of shelters built by students at the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture.

= William J. R. Curtis, prestigious critic of architecture, is to chair the jury

= The total prize fund for the Awards is 60,000 Euros for the three categories

= Martha Thorne (Pritzker Awards director), Carme Pinós, Francesc Rifé, Juan Domingo Santos, Ramón Vilalta and Ramón Monfort will be part of the jury.

The Spanish Ceramic Tile Manufacturers' Association (ASCER) is launching the eighth edition of Tile of Spain Awards of Architecture and Interior Design competition. The Awards are made in recognition of projects that best reflect the development of Spanish ceramic tiles in cutting edge architecture.

The deadline for handing in the projects is 30th October 2009. The Awards count on with a high recognition and prestige among the professional field and each year they have a jury comprise the most renowned architects. This year the jury will be chaired by the prestigious architect William J. R. Curtis and the architects Martha Thorne (architect and executive director of the Pritzker Awards), Carme Pinós, Ramón Vilalta (RCR Arquitectes), Juan Domingo Santos and Ramón Monfort; and the interior designer Francesc Rifé.

"The aim of the competition is to promote online discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.

World Habitat Awards 2009 - call for entries!

The Building and Social Housing Foundation is currently seeking entries for the 2009 World Habitat Awards competition. Established in 1985, the World Habitat Awards recognise innovative and sustainable housing and habitat projects worldwide, which are capable of being transferred to other contexts.

Two awards are given annually, one to a housing project from the North and one from the global South.

Entries are assessed by a panel of international judges and an award of £10,000 is presented to the two winning projects at the annual United Nations global celebration of World Habitat Day.

Re-Skin Our Cities An Idea Worth Spreading

By an increasingly wide margin, the largest emission of greenhouse gases in our cities comes from the operation of our buildings — commercial and residential. For example in New York it's 79%, London 52%, Hong Kong 72% and Toronto 63%. Add to this list Beijing, Rome, Madrid, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Paris and the average is likely to be between 60% and 80%.

DEFINING A CREATIVE HUB COMPETITION

A Creative Hub can be defined as a space that induces Creative Thinking, which is a combination of creativity, curiosity and communication. A place, real or virtual, where designers meet ordinary people to bring creative influences and creative acts.

A Creative Hub has the ambition to create and enhance every local resource that can attract creative brains in a specific territory. In today’s scenario, every global city is competing with each other to build creative hubs, which are also architectural masterpieces, developed according to local needs of region. But real needs are difficult to be identified and they change from region to region.

architectural competition for the premier's office complex: Bhisho

The Department of Public Works of the Province of the Eastern Cape, as the Promoter of this competition, invites eligible persons to submit design proposals for a new office complex for the Premier in Bhisho. The aim of the competition is to create a distinctive landmark building that resonates with the cultural values, aspirations and characteristics of the people of the Eastern Cape, capturing elements of the rich history of the area. It is intended that this development will act as a catalyst for change, growth and development in Bhisho and enhance the status of Bhisho as the capital of the Eastern Cape.