Mexico-based architect Armando Birlain López’s winning design in the Denver Architectural League’s ideas competition for riverfront micro-housing. 

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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Best Creativity: NYC Loop, by FXFOWLE.

When Mayor Bloomberg announced New York City’s Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge last winter, we were excited to see how designers would reimagine these idle relics of last century’s infrastructure into something other than a shading device for smartphone-browsing in sunny weather. From the looks of the finalists, which Bloomberg announced Tuesday, tomorrow’s payphone could have a lot of app-style features, from weather reports and wayfinding to voice and gesture control.

A handful of New York’s roughly 11,000 payphones already serve as wifi hotspots thanks to a pilot program (PDF) launched by the city last summer, so the leap to hyperconnectivity isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem. A few years down the line, we could all be using a shiny new network of payphones to call taxis by voice command, charge our devices, check the weather for our urban farms, and, inevitably, look at ads. The six finalists in five categories—creativity, connectivity, functionality, community impact, and visual design—are now competing for the popular choice prize. Vote for your favorite on Facebook before 5 p.m. EST on March 14, and you could help shape the payphone of the future. Read more!

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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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via GeekSugar

Payphones are at worst regarded as germ-riddled, sketchy punchlines; at best, they’re nothing more than an obsolete part of the landscape, useful only in the rarest of circumstances when you’ve lost your cell phone, there’s nobody trustworthy in sight, and you need to call a number you have memorized within the next fifteen minutes. There are only 11,000 left in New York City today, down from the 35,000 high of the late-90s.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, however, wants to change that image. Rather than banishing payphones to the technology graveyard populated by VCRs and (RIP) tape decks, he’s positing a challenge: redesign the ubiquitous, and seemingly useless, New York City payphone. A little over a month ago, Bloomberg and his office launched the Reinvent Payphones Design Challenge. Along with NYC’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications Commissioner Rahul N. Merchant and Chief Digital Officer Rachel Haot, the contest is designed to “rally urban designers, planners, technologists and policy experts to create physical and virtual prototypes that imagine the future of New York City’s public pay telephones.”

Because the current payphone contracts expire in October of 2014, and given how Hurricane Sandy left many New Yorkers with no cell service and no option other than to turn to payphones, the time is ripe to focus on the almost-but-not-quite-archaic devices. Continue.

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OMA is at it again, this time winning the competition to design the new École Centrale engineering school and its surrounding urban development in the research and innovation zone of Saclay, southwest of Paris. Led by Clément Blanchet, the director of OMA projects in France, the winning concept of a “lab city” was selected from four competing international architectural practices. Read more.

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“Papilio” by Selime Osman and Ilyas Awadh

Late last year, Architizer helped launch the Cembrit Bullhorn Competition, which asked designers to redesign a Malmi train station in Helsinki. In describing the brief, we noted how despite it being one the busiest and most-trafficked in Finland, the Malmi station was, according to one organizer, a “worn out and unappealing non-place”. The challenge was then to redesign the existing station and the urban fabric around it without calling for a wholesale rehaul of either. The stakes were high–a total of EUR 22,500 in prizes, to be exact–with nearly one hundred international architects and designers vying for the top award and the EUR 10,000 that went with it.

The winners were announced earlier this year, and, as promised, the first place winning team Selime Osman and Ilyas Awadh were invited to Helsinki for the capital’s World Design Capital (on-going) celebrations. Hailing from Malmö, Sweden, the young architects’ proposal was chosen for its “poetic” transformation of the Malmi station. All of the winners were among the 15 shortlisted projects that the competition organizers collected in a new exhibition, to open next month. See more.

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The winners of the 2012 New York CityVision competition have been announced! The jury, composed of president Joshua Prince-Ramos of REX-NY, Eva Franch i Gilabert of the Storefront for Art and Architecture, Roland Snooks of Kokkugia, Shohei Shigematsu of OMA, Alessandro Orsini of Archi[TE]nsions, and Mitchell Joachim of Terreform One, reviewed and selected the best entries for the Rome-based competition, which posed the question, “If the future is gone, what past is expecting us?”

Entrants generally answered this question with wit, in some cases looking for the bright side of a forlorn pessimism. Many of the drawings showed a good deal of Archigram-like inventiveness, and also drew from that group’s graphic style.

First Prize: Eirini Giannakopoulou, Stefano Carera, Hilario Isola, and Matteo Norzi

The winning entry envisioned a scenario where Manhattan had become too overwhelming, leading its residents to move to New York’s other Burroughs. Manhattan is then turned into a gigantic trash dump, where only the tops of its iconic towers are left showing above the rolling landscape of landfill.

Click through for more of the top entries, plus honorable mentions.

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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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Daniel Libeskind, A New World Trade Center

In the months following the 9/11 attacks, an array of competitions, conferences, and initiatives was launched to consider the appropriateness and terms of rebuilding Ground Zero.When, in mid-2002, the Lower Manhattan Development Company (LMDC) released an abysmal set of six initial plans for a new World Trade Center, a reactionary wave of architects entered the fray, each with their own vision to rehabilitate and transform Ground Zero into a thriving urban center once more. Their plans, however loose or conceptual they may have been, promised to offer the city something more than what it would receive a decade later–Daniel Libeskind’s diluted masterplan for a series of equally bland towers (Libeskind’s first ideas for a tower at Ground Zero above). Explore the alternatives to 2011′s Ground Zero.

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