Portable Spot Cleaner, designed by Adrian Mankovecky, Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava, Slovakia

If the Electrolux Design Lab competition were given charge of the future of our home appliances, all our gadgets would be monochrome, have oversize back-lit interfaces, and be either rounded or flexible. Since its inception in 2003, the competition has been asking industrial design students to imagine the future of home appliances, offering 5,000 Euros and a six-month stint at an Electrolux design center to the winner.  Each year’s theme is different, but the finalists always have a remarkable family resemblance. And they always manage to work past the fact that domestic appliances are energy guzzlers by suggesting some as-yet-unproven battery technology – sugar crystal batteries are a hot favorite this year, perhaps because they were specified in last year’s winning entry.

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I’m trying to remember, did I ever think about things like public design, civic planning, or product innovation in the eighth grade?  I’ll be honest, the eighth grade wasn’t all that long ago. I know that in language arts we mapped sentences; we learned about Julius Caesar’s murderous frenemies in Latin class. But the real-world work of designers—isolating problems, then drafting, tweaking and prototyping solutions—I don’t remember that being part of our curriculum. Lately, however, design practice, with its inherent capacity for invention, community engagement and change, is finding new relevance in K-12 classrooms.

Young designers are encouraged by institutions to participate in solving social and environmental problems. The Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum and Ford Motor Co. Fund, for instance announced, just last week, the winners of their Community Design Competition.  The competition challenged students to locate opportunities for improvement within their communities, and then brainstorm solutions.  Open to schools in Miami, Chicago, San Antonio and San Diego, the competition is part of the Smithsonian and Cooper-Hewitt’s ongoing promotion of design as valuable, educative practice for young people.  The entries attest to the creativity, enthusiasm, and thoughtfulness with which the students approached their communities’ needs.

First-place glory and $5,000 was awarded to the Henry Ford Academy: Alameda School of Art + Design in San Antonio. The 9^th-grade students designed a backpack specifically tailored to the needs of the homeless, inspired by their neighbors at the Haven 4 Hope Transition Shelter only a block from their school.

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There must be many reasons why the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) rakes in one competition victory after another, but the way the firm presents its projects is definitely a factor. BIG has become the master of the atmospheric rendering, and it reaps rich dividends. In the case of the firm’s latest win – beating Zaha Hadid, among others, to build a mosque complex in Tirana, Albania – the sun-kissed images are a triumph of orientalist seduction, and I confess to being willingly mesmerized.

From all BIG projects, we have come to expect a standard template for visual presentation. First, the dramatic photo-realistic images: full of light and people, but dream-like, as though viewed through a fogged window. Then there are the explanatory diagrams, gradually leading you by the nose through the architect’s conception. And finally, the animation – the videos have few colors, the human figures are almost always just white, and the only concession to realism is a few renderings edited into the animation.

All three elements are wielded powerfully in the Albanian project. Read more…

BIG’s proposal for Greenland’s National Gallery of Art.

We’re having a hard time keeping up with all the competitions the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has won, and all the prestigious projects they’ve bagged, just in the past three months. It’s certainly a wonderful start of the year for the maverick Danish firm, but what is truly impressive is the consistency across all the projects we’ve seen. Bjarke Ingels is nothing if not imaginative, of course. But we love him more because of the way every one of the projects, shown below, actively seeks out rules to break and conventions to challenge.

The Stockholmsporten Competition
Client: City of Stockholm, Swedish Transport Administration
Collaborators: Grontmij, Spacescape

In their latest win, BIG brings life to that most mundane of public infrastructures: a highway intersection. The planned Hjulsta Intersection, 15 km north of Stockholm, would have divided a neighborhood into four unconnected silos. BIG’s winning proposal re-connects these neighborhoods with a pedestrian and bicycle loop. Among the public buildings proposed along this loop are a shopping mall and a sports center; but also a mosque and a hammam. And if that wasn’t inclusive enough, Ingels has put a humongous eye in the sky – a mirrored sphere, powered by solar energy, floating above the entrance to Stockholm. Read more…

The 2009 Solar Decathlon at the National Mall. Photo: Richard King.

The 20 international student teams participating in this year’s Solar Decathlon can finally breathe easy today. For the last month, the teams have been up in arms because the National Park Service revoked its permit to allow the Decathlon to take place at its customary venue, Washington D. C.’s National Mall.

The Decathlon, an initiative of the U.S. Department of Energy, brings together students from all over the world to build innovative energy-efficient homes. It has gradually become the United States’ premier solar energy competition, a visionary platform for the sustainable technologies of tomorrow. And a big part of the competition’s prestige is that it is always held on what is often referred to as the nation’s front yard. But on January 11, the participating teams were told that a new venue had to be found, because the Department of the Interior (DOI) was worried about ruining the grass. Read more…

Late last month I had the pleasure of joining three amazing women on a jury for the One Good Chair competition in Las Vegas. While it’s always confounding to talk about sustainability in windowless convention facilities, in a city that’s a manifestation of the monstrous hybrid concept writ large, we were delighted to see green moves on a small scale. My fellow jurors and I were pleased to review the five finalists in the competition and learn how young designers from all over the world are thinking about materials, packaging, ergonomics, and more.

Run by the Las Vegas Market and supported by the Sustainable Furnishings Council (SFC), (Metropolis is a media sponsor), the competition is the brainchild of architect Lance Hosey who hatched the idea three years ago. Read more…

The heyday of the McMansion has been on its way out for quite some time – perhaps more by economic circumstance than by fashion of choice – but Treehugger.com founder Graham Hill is out to actively sway our consumption preferences. His latest project, LifeEdited, is “tiny huge design contest” that calls for a crowdsourced redesign of one spatially economic, 420-square foot Manhattan apartment: his very own. Read more…

It is hard to think of a competition more symbolic of our times than the CoolClimate Art contest – which uses the internet to put art in the service of climate change awareness. In July, the organizers of the contest spoke to Metropolis’s editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy about their mission to galvanize public opinion through iconic images that communicate the tragedy and challenges of climate change in an arresting and provocative way.

Over 1,000 artists from all over the world responded to the call, submitting photographs, digital art and sculptures through the artist mega site deviantART.com. Twenty of those entries were chosen by a panel of artists and environmentalists, and then published last week on the Huffington Post web site for a popular vote. Here are the top three entries:

No Pollution Please, (above) by Greek photographer Christos Lamprianidis, was declared the winner yesterday, at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. Read more…

The Jefferson National Expansion Memorial is the 91-acre park that surrounds Eero Saarinen’s monumental Gateway Arch in St. Louis. While the Arch is a national icon, the park is completely cut off from the city by an Interstate  Highway in the west and a patch of wasteland across the Mississippi in the east. Crisscrossed by thoroughfares and mostly ignored by tourists, it has come to be seen as an obstacle to the development of St. Louis downtown. Ten months ago, The City + The Arch + The River competition challenged architects to use the park grounds as a way to renew the bonds between St. Louis and its most famous monument.

The five finalists were announced last month, and a design proposed by an interdisciplinary team led by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) has just been declared the winner. Read more…

The Living City Design Competition invites project teams from around the world to imagine how existing cities might be retrofitted to achieve all twenty imperatives of the Living Building Challenge, the world’s most rigorous green building standard. Like the standard itself, the competition reflects our belief that humanity has all of the necessary tools and skills to resolve the environmental, social and economic crises of our day. If we are to live up to our potential, however, we must first clearly define what a truly sustainable society would look like. With that powerful and practical vision in mind, we can begin working toward the future we hope for. Read more…