Two months ago, we proudly announced the launch of the AIDS Memorial Park Design Competition, calling for architects and designers from around the world to re-imagine a 17,000 square-foot plot of land sitting across from the epicenter of New York City’s AIDS epidemic, St. Vincent’s Hospital. After the closure of St. Vincent’s in 2010, plans were announced for the conversion of the triangular plot into an open public space. The AIDS Memorial Park Coalition gathered its founding members shortly thereafter, with the dream of seeing Greenwich Village receive a new neighborhood park and a memorial to commemorate the thousands of New Yorkers who faced the epidemic with unprecedented courage. What began as grassroots campaigning quickly gained momentum, and within a few months, an impressive roster of jurors and coalition members joined the initiative, from architects like Richard Meier and Michael Arad to entertainment leaders and West Village locals Julianne Moore and Susan Sarandon.

After receiving 475 entries from over 26 U.S. states and 32 countries, the jury deliberated long and hard, and the results are finally in. As proud media co-sponsors alongside Architectural Record, Architizer is happy to announce the winning design for the AIDS Memorial Park Design Competition. The winner and the runners up after the jump!

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2011 Residential Winner, Kona House, by Belzberg Architects.

Have you (or someone you know and/or love) built a project using Italian tile over the past five years? If so, Ceramics of Italy is interested in celebrating your work. And if not, go check out their products and start using them, so you can enter next year!

The coalition of more than 200 Italian tile designers and manufacturers is well-known for patronizing the work of architects as part of their organizational mission. For the last two decades, the group has hosted two annual competitions to celebrate the work of architects using Italian tile. One is a design competition to design CoI’s trade show pavilion (read our coverage here!), while the other honors work that’s already been built. Both competitions attract the biggest names in architecture, with past winners including Bernard Tschumi, Aldo Rossi, and Arquitectonica. CoI has spent two decades building a symbiotic relationship with architects, and they’re a model for other professional trades engaged with building and design.

Which is why we’re excited to be partnering with Ceramics of Italy once again, this time to announce the launch of 2012 Tile Competition, celebrating excellence in design utilizing Italian ceramic tiles. Read on!

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San Francisco’s Bar Agricole designed by Aidlin Darling Design, the winning design at the 2011 James Beard Awards. Image via.

James Beard is a household name in the food world. Hailed as the “dean of American cookery” by the New York Times in 1954, Beard blazed a trail for the American ‘foodie,’ seeing the potential of a fledgling food culture to become a celebrated national cuisine. As teacher, television personality, journalist, and cookbook author, Beard championed a passion for America’s diverse culinary heritage, which, with his help, has blossomed into sweeping movements in gastronomy, from the turn to local products and markets to new kinds of food journalism.

In essence, the James Beard Foundation knows that food is more than just nutrition. Food is “an integral part of our everyday lives. Food is economics, politics, entertainment, culture, fashion, family, passion…and nourishment.” Through their eyes, food is in close kinship with design: the comfort of a familiar kitchen table can beckon you to savor a home-cooked meal, and the cold city air brings added appreciation to a steamy street-vending cart. And of course, a restaurant is much more than its menu; it is an entirely designed experience, a single or multi-course program crafted to stimulate your senses and take you somewhere else.

Thus the James Beard Awards, which have played an instrumental role in shaping America’s culinary landscape, have aptly included awards in restaurant design. What Time proclaimed as “the Oscars of the food world” recognizes the visual and the spatial as key ingredients in any dining experience, awarding architects, interior designers as well as graphic designers for their contributions to gastronomy. The James Beard Award for Restaurant Design hopes to empower and connect talented designers with a new world of potential clients. To learn more about the award, visit the James Beard Foundation site, and submit your entry before January 20^th, 2012.

The ultimate urban dining experience: A Razor, A Shiny Knife serves lunch on the L train in New York. Image courtesy A Razor, A Shiny Knife.

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An LED lights up when the shelter is occupied, while an internal sensor sends data about the cat’s stay to a base colony.

It’s estimated that there are over 10,000 stray cats in New York City. But with myriad other human problems, issues like feral cats tend to fall by the city’s wayside. A recent competition organized by Architects for Animals asked the city’s designers to address the burgeoning problem by designing cat shelters that would eventually be donated to animal care centers throughout the five boroughs. Continue.

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Just two weeks ago, we announced the launch of the AIDS Memorial Park Competition hosted by Architizer and Architectural Record. The design competition is the culmination of years of grassroots campaigning to build a community park, memorial, and learning center to fill the triangle of land opposite St. Vincent’s Hospital, New York’s watershed HIV treatment center.

While St. Vincent’s closed in 2010 and awaits its own transformation into a luxury residential development, St. Vincent’s Triangle Park is to become a monument to the hospital’s central role in New York’s battle against the AIDS epidemic, commemorating the over 100,000 New Yorkers who have died from AIDS and celebrating the caregivers and activists who responded heroically to the crisis.

The campaign is currently calling upon architects and designers to submit proposals for this new memorial, accepting competition entries from around the world through midnight on January 21^st, 2012 via Architizer. Just within two weeks, the cause has gained considerable momentum, its competition jury growing to include fashion designer Kenneth Cole, Academy Award-winning actress Whoopi Goldberg, and Thelma Golden, the Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem, as announced in an official press release today. Also joining the jury is Brad Hoylman, a Manhattan community board chair representing community interests in urban issues in the West Village. The new jurors join an already remarkable roster of design visionaries, including Barry Bergdoll, Liz Diller, Richard Meier, Robert Hammond, Ken Smith and competition chair Michael Arad.

Meanwhile, the AIDS Memorial Park Coalition has garnered the support of numerous entertainment and business leaders, including Village residents Julianne Moore, Susan Sarandon, John Cameron Mitchell and Todd Stephens, along with Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan.

“As a longtime supporter of those living with HIV/AIDS, I support the coalition’s efforts to create AIDS Memorial Park in New York City. It’s time for us to preserve this historically significant location with a living memorial that connects current and future generations. Also, as a downtown resident and as a mother, I believe the park will be an inspirational, educational and green public oasis – something we all need more of in the city,” said Sarandon.

To participate, submit your design proposal for the AIDS Memorial Park through the Architizer competitions page before midnight on January 21^st, 2012. Winners will be announced on February 1^st, 2012, with one winner receiving $5,000 and one runner-up receiving $2,000. The coalition aims to complete construction of the winning proposal by World AIDS Day on December 1^st, 2014.

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Image (c) nori*, via Flickr.

Back in November we brought word of a great design competition hosted by Cembrit, the Danish manufacturer of fibre cement. Cembrit’s 2012 Bullhorn Design Competition focuses on Helsinki – an appropriate choice, given the city’s title of the World Design Capital 2012! Specifically, Cembrit is asking designers of all ilk to address the city’s largest suburban commuter station, in Malmi, and propose a redesign to invigorate the station and the urban fabric surrounding it. It’s a great brief, one that asks designers to intelligently redesign a pre-existing building, rather that creating more unnecessary waste through design.

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The history of New York City is inextricably bound to the history of the AIDS Epidemic. Over 100,000 New Yorkers have died from AIDS, yet the city still has no significant public memorial to the friends, loved ones, family members, and fellow citizens lost during the crisis.

Architizer and Architectural Record are happy to present a new design competition to change that. Keep reading.

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Photo: Design Libya

Beginning in February, the world watched as Libya under the rule of Muammar Gaddafi descended into chaos. News outlets worldwide were clogged with reports of escalating civilian uprisings and military retaliations, leading all the way up to that fateful October day when the Libyan ruler was captured and brutally killed by rebel forces.

As the capital of Libya and the main arena for civil war, Tripoli will long bear the scars of a bloody revolution. Yet signs of a new Libya are beginning to take shape: Bab al-Azizia, Gaddafi’s former military stronghold, bunker and palace in the heart of Tripoli, was transformed from a 2.3 square-mile symbol of fear and oppression into a place for public gatherings and weekly markets before it was finally demolished in late October. Of even greater interest to us, Bab al-Azizia is now the site for an open architecture competition.

Design Libya is calling upon architects, designers, planners, artists, students and the community to re-envision Bab al-Azizia as “an open space to be enjoyed by the public.” Though there are no secured government contracts, the competition will culminate in a major exhibition in Tripoli, along with a publication and a website. Though this may come as a disappointment to some, the competition format is perhaps indicative of a more democratic approach to distributing prestigious projects. While Libya awaits government elections, the competition will start to give some form to a “powerful symbol of a new, free Libya,” whether this will be realized or not. It is the starting shot for the circulation of ideas, the impetus for creative people around the world to contemplate the future of a country that faces a long process of rebuilding.

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Scandinavian capital cities pioneered mass transit-serviced suburban planning in the post-War years. Copenhagen, for example, was famous for its “five finger” plan, which wove together an expansive number of suburban areas with amazing efficiency. These days, as suburban development slows to a halt and young people cluster in the inner-cities, even Scandinavia is dealing with the fallout of post-suburbia: out-of-date train stations, decaying infrastructure, and dwindling investments in public space.

Malmi, the largest suburb of Helsinki, has launched Bullhorn: Cembrit Design Competition to address these problems through design. Together with Helsinki Design Capital 2012 and fibre cement manufacturers Cembrit, Malmi is asking for proposals to redesign Malmi’s train station and the area immediately surrounding it. The winners of this ideas competition will receive awards of up to 10,000 euros, be part of an exhibition on display throughout the year, and attend Helsinki Design Capital 2012. Read on for more information about how to enter.

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You’re probably aware that eVolo publishes some of the smartest, sharpest architectural criticism out there. They also run one of the most prestigious, typology-redefining ideas competitions out there, now entering its seventh year.

The competition asks designers to re-imagine the crystalizing typology of the Modern era: the Skyscraper. Yes, that beacon of prosperity, profit, and ultimately, progress. We live in a very, very different world than Louis Sullivan. His symbol of progress is our symbol of a dystopian reality. In that sense, eVolo is asking you to unpack the skyscraper as an idea, symbol, and technological icon – then propose its future.

eVolo has launched their 2012 Competition page. Take note: early registration ends soon, on November 15, 2011. We’re giving away ten (yes, ten) year-long subscriptions to the magazine to get the word out. Click through for details on how to snag one of them.

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