The Mexico-based practice SAC Studio de Arquitectura y Ciudad won first place in the Denver Architectural League’s ideas competition for riverfront micro-housing. SAC team members: Wyatt O’Day, Rodolfo Unda, João Barbosa, Jovana Grujevska, and Armando Birlain López.

On Friday the Denver Architectural League announced the winners of its micro-housing ideas competition. The contest solicited designs for an eight-unit building with micro-apartments that range from 250 to 375 square feet, sited on a narrow swath of riverbank in a sparse industrial neighborhood on the outskirts of downtown. The league invited architects to imagine a structure so virtuous—net-zero, built on a leftover slope of undesirable land, virtually no parking, etc.—that its inhabitants might just be theoretical figments themselves. (Who wants to live in 250 square feet and be forced to take the bus to town?)

All in all, the competition drew 70 proposals, 25 of which came from abroad. And what do you know, the winners all hail from outside the United States, which makes sense given this country’s general discomfort with small (New York, San Francisco, and this place excepted). Read more!

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Our A+ trophy, designed by Snarkitecture!

NYCxDESIGN, New York City’s first design festival, is in high gear—establishing the Big Apple’s reputation as the Design Capital of the World. And Architizer is a part of it.

Bookended by the Frieze Art Fair at the beginning and the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (ICFF) near the end, NYCxDESIGN, which runs through May 21, brings together culture, education, commerce, and entertainment with hundreds of events ranging from exhibitions and installations to trade shows, talks, and open studios. But more than that, the festival aims to merge culture with commerce, and to bring design to all audiences.

That’s where Architizer comes in. As the world’s largest architecture website, Architizer is similarly committed to connecting design with the people by bringing architecture out of the echo chamber. Which is why we launched the Architizer A+ Awards, the biggest architectural awards program in the world, with 50+ categories and more than 200 jurors. Instead of celebrating one architect and making architecture into something rarefied and arcane, the A+ Awards celebrate the diversity of architecture around the globe, with entrants coming from more than 100 different countries. More after the jump!

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More than 2,000 yards of Sunbrella Canvas Natural fabric was used in Situ Studio’s “reOrder” installation at the Brooklyn Museum. Photo: Keith Sirchio.

Architects use more than steel and glass. In fact, we’ve witnessed some pretty amazing projects, whether art installations or giant buildings, made with fabric. (See Situ Studio‘s amazing “reOrder” installation for the Brooklyn Museum, pictured above.) That’s why Sunbrella, the world’s leading performance fabric brand, wants you to let your imagination run wild and show us just how this beautiful and durable material can change the way we think about shade as it relates to building and space design.

Sunbrella’s “Future of Shade” competition invites architects and designers to submit proposals using Sunbrella fabric for the chance to win $10,000 and a chance to showcase their designs at AIA in Denver. The projects can be as big as a city or as small as a pavilion: They just need to demonstrate an innovative use of fabric to provide protection from the elements, enhance the aesthetics of a building, or both.

A sail shade installation at the College of Textiles at NC State University featuring Sunbrella Clarity fabrics. Photo: courtesy of Sunbrella

Starting April 26, the Architizer editorial team will be looking for the strongest ideas to showcase to millions of readers and social media fans. You have till June 13 to submit your proposal, so look sharp and dream big!

For more info, and submission guidelines, check out the competition page.

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Miele Kitchen by Tamie Glass & Uli Danel

That headline catch your attention? Good. We’ve got an amazing competition for you—and best of all anyone can enter: architects, interior designers, home builders, or just anyone who likes to cook (and has a space in which to do it!).

We’ve teamed up with The German appliance company Miele in search of the coolest kitchens in the world. With its full suite of kitchen appliances that double as objets d’art, Miele wants to see how you use its products to enable the most cutting-edge kitchen design.

Starting today, April 22, Miele and Architizer invite all architects, interior designers, kitchen designers, home builders, developers, interior architects, and home owners to submit their exceptional Miele kitchens for a chance to win an all-expenses-paid trip for two to Eurocucina in Milan, along with a visit to Miele’s international headquarters in Gütersloh Germany! The winning designs will be featured on Architizer.com and shared with Architizer’s 1,000,000+ social media fans.

Entries must include at least three Miele appliances, and must be submitted by July 12. For more information and submission guidelines, check out the competition page. Good luck!

Miele Kitchen by Jorge Martinez

Miele Kitchen by Cassie Wyner

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Pop-up designed for Nicola Formichetti by Gage/Clemenceau Architects, one of last year’s competition winners. Photo: Evan Joseph

BOFFO Building Fashion is back! The series, a collaboration with public-art nonprofit BOFFO, pairs emerging architect teams with up-and-coming fashion designers to create (some pretty amazing) pop-up stores in New York City. And after last year’s tremendous success—two AIA NY Interior Merit awards, plus incredible spaces for lingerie brand The Lake and Stars, Gaga stylist Nicola Formichetti, and more—we’re excited to announce Building Fashion’s latest iteration!

This year, we have a new location (a shipping container near Manhattan’s Meatpacking district) and three new designers! First up: Michael Bastian, the award-winning menswear maven whose riffs on all-American classics like cardigans and khakis have revitalized men’s fashion in the US.

Now all we need is an architect!

Looks from Michael Bastian’s spring/summer 2010 and 2013 collections

We’re running a competition to design Michael Bastian’s pop-up store! Architects have from today, April 12, till May 23 to submit design proposals expressing their vision of a retail space specifically tailored to the Michael Bastian brand. The jury will include Eva Franch (Storefront for Art and Architecture), Stefano Tonchi (W Magazine), and David Van Der Leer (Guggenheim Museum), along with other industry professionals and BOFFO and Architizer staff.

The winner will receive $20,000 to build and realize his or her vision. (Architectural Systems, a resource of curated interior finishes from around the world, will donate $4000 of materials at cost for installation.) The Michael Bastian pop-up will be open to the public from November 1 to 21.

You can find more competition details, including how to apply, here.

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Photo: Iwan Baan

Hey, NYC architects: Do you have an idea that will revolutionize city living? Well, you still have a few days left to submit your scheme for our Pitch the City competition, a collaboration between Architizer and the Municipal Art Society of New York as part of the New Museum’s Ideas City 2013 festival. The winners will get to present their initiatives to a room full of urban enthusiasts, receive critiques from a jury of experts, and be featured on Architizer!

Interested? Send a brief description (250 words max) and four to six low-res images to editorial@architizer.com with the subject line “Pitch the City.” Deadline is THIS FRIDAY, March 8. More info here. Bon chance!

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PS1 will install a smaller version of its VW Dome in Rockaway Beach to host competition events and provide a relief tent. Photo courtesy of MoMA PS1.

Beyond the very pressing need to restore electricity, gas, and subway service to the parts of New York still reeling from Sandy, the larger problem of how to build more resilient communities remains. “The biggest question is: How do you build a sustainable, protected, eco-friendly coastline that’s not going to be swept away?” says MoMA PS1 director Klaus Biesenbach.

To spark a larger conversation about smart rebuilding in Rockaway, Queens, MoMA’s architecture and design department and PS1 announced a call for ideas. The museum is inviting artists, architects, designers, and the general public to submit proposals for protecting the coastline, rebuilding the boardwalk, devising alternative housing models, creating new social spaces, and more. The deadline is March 15, so get on it! Continue.

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Toronto is going through a major, more glamorous, transformation right now, thanks largely to an ambitious plan to redevelop its waterfront. The new, LEED-certified George Brown Waterfront Health Sciences Campus has already transformed the once seedy lakefront to an energetic, humming urban center. The just-announced Eau Du Soleil towers will soon make up one of Canada’s tallest condo communities. And Toronto’s waterfront plans prompted the Intelligent Community Forum to name the city as one of the world’s top intelligent communities.

Another waterfront project that has us excited?  The Awards Pavilion for the 2015 Pan American Games. (Yeah, we know we have a while to wait.) Designed by four recent graduates from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, the new stadium will be made out of bundles of reusable vinyl-based balloons floating across the Pan American Village. (Delightful!) The design won first place at the AIAS competition in 2011. See more images!

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Roth Sheppard’s design competition is inspired by micro-units in Europe, such as this short-stay apartment in The Hague by Maff. Photo courtesy of Maff

Architects love to design micro-apartments, but do people love to live in them? Jeff Sheppard, principal of Roth Sheppard Architects, hopes so. He and his colleagues at the Denver Architectural League are betting that tiny units will appeal to young Denverites who find themselves priced out of the mortgage market and who want to live in dense neighborhoods. The league recently launched a tiny-dwelling design competition that adds up to a particularly tall order: an eight-unit net-zero building on a difficult slice of riverbank on the outskirts of downtown. At 375 square feet a pop, the units will definitely be more generous than the 220-square-footers planned for San Francisco and the 250 now allowed in New York—but still diminutive compared with Denver’s 500-square-foot prefab tiny Starbucks. Read more!

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The architect Caroline O’Donnell—of the Ithaca, New York–based experimental design and research studio CODA—is the winner of MoMA PS1′s 2013 Young Architects Program. Her design, Party Wall, will provide shade and succor to the crowds of romper-clad, aviator-wearing art enthusiasts who gather for PS1′s summer Warm-Up series.

Riffing on the idea of a party (or shared) wall, O’Donnell’s design calls for a vertical shade that defines space with the shadows it casts. The steel structure is clad with a porous facade made from the castoffs of the eco-friendly skateboard manufacturer Comet. “Party Wall arches over the various available spaces, activating them for different purposes, while making evident that even the most unexpected materials can always be reinvented to originate architectural form and its ability to communicate with the public,” MoMA architecture and design curator Pedro Gadanho said in the announcement about the award. Plus, the wall will include detachable benches made from uncut skateboard misprints, whose arrangements will be managed by a team of spritely “pool boys” wearing uniforms made by, who else, American Apparel. Read more! 

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