Cloudscap.es Award

23. 02. 2011

by admin

At the Architecture Biennale 2010 and in collaboration with Tetsuo Kondo Architects of Tokyo...

At the Architecture Biennale 2010 and in collaboration with Tetsuo Kondo Architects of Tokyo, we demonstrated exactly what climate engineering is capable of. To do this we used an installation, “cloudscapes”, a walk-in, artificially-generated cloud in the Arsenale building.

Next to the visual cloud there was a virtual cloud (of ideas) in the form of an online competition. Together with AEDES Network Campus Berlin we invited people, through an internet platform and on site, to take part in the ideas competition, CLOUDSCAP.ES.

“The appearance of buildings or building shells has changed considerably over the past 150 years. Architects and engineers are looking for new solutions as a result of new knowledge acquired, while taking global warming into consideration. The prize will be awarded to the best and most audacious proposal. This international competition for innovative ideas in connection with the building shell is, therefore, open to everyone, and above all to architects, engineers, artists, students, dreamers and inventors.”

The competition was developed together with Opensimsim and was published on the online platform, www.cloudscap.es. A fee of $50 was charged for uploading a work to the website. The online community assessed and shortlisted certain works, which then entered into the actual competition. Each month six monthly winners were chosen by online vote. Over a period of three months, 18 works were chosen and shortlisted for the final round. An international jury of professionals and academics has now chosen the winners from the list of 18 works. The prize money is $16,000. In addition, there is a special prize of $1,500 sponsored by Zumtobel for a maximum of two works chosen from all the works submitted. During the final month, Zumtobel also paid the fee for students wishing to participate.

Intention

Architects have to face up to the changing nature of the challenges in this world. In addition to global warming – caused by the burning of fossil fuels – new generations of architects will have to deal with other issues. Over a billion people on earth have no access to clean drinking water. About 30% of the world population lives in what are referred to as “informal communities”. Topics such as post-fossil mobility, “urban farming”, inner-city climate conditions that suddenly make conditions unbearable in the summer, even in a temperate zone, etc. All these issues will affect our towns and cities and our buildings. Architecture is compelled to “adapt”. This will be necessary within a timeframe that is considerably shorter than is usual for regeneration cycles. However, the opportunities on offer for architecture are considerable.

In this context, the façade is undoubtedly the key topic. The façade is the building “clothes” and, therefore, impacts on the design of the building and overall on the town or city and public space. At the same time, the façade is the meeting point between indoors and outdoors. Consequently, it determines the occupancy quality inside and influences greatly the occupancy quality of the public space – physically and in terms of design. The façade determines the energy consumption levels of a building and the shell facilitates energy generation and water collection etc. These topics overlie the question of whether to use material, glass or stone. New materials will address different topics and will, therefore, influence design.

Many of these issues have to be planned and examined in an engineering context. However, the design also has to be incorporated into the whole and not simply added layer by layer, in order to avoid the look of our towns and cities being dominated by full thermal insulation. A multi-disciplinary and creative approach is required. A step backwards to the stone-based architecture from the first half of the 20th Century promises just as little success as the idea that some magic machine could at some stage solve all these problems.

The total number of issues and the required speed of change (many towns and cities have grown over centuries and now have to adapt in the space of a few decades) demand an international, open collaboration and exchange of ideas and experience – open source. The platform here is provided by new media – the internet and Web 2.0.

The Online Competition

Cloudscap.es is a platform for ideas that is open to everyone (open source) – a virtual cloud of ideas.
Architects, students, engineers, inventors etc. can all sketch out their ideas and present them on this site, therefore allowing the large online community to examine them.

This platform offers a starting point for the necessary discussion about the question of the building shell and will enrich the experience of all those involved.

Over a period of 3 months, 46 works were submitted. In total, the site was clicked a quarter of a million times. In the end, people from 132 countries around the world visited the website. Most visitors were from Germany, followed by the USA, Spain, Poland, Italy, Canada and Russia. Over 1,100 votes were required in the final round in order to be among the 6 monthly winners. While at the start of the competition, those with a large online following had an advantage, this balanced out towards the end due to the large number of visitors to the site. One university in Florida even paid the fee for their students of architecture who wanted to take part in the competition.

The map is a visual indication of the countries from which people visited the internet platform (green shading indicates the visitor numbers).

Conclusion

The cloudscap.es competition was a huge success. A lasting cloud of ideas remains from the hugely successful physical cloudscapes installation at the 2010 Architecture Biennale. The wonderful ideas submitted by the participants have generated a large, worldwide online community. The work submitted was not just for the eyes of a small jury, as is usually the case. Young architects and engineers and other creative people were given an opportunity to present their ideas to the worldwide community. Many of them have even thanked us for giving them this opportunity.

At the same time a tool has been created that more or less in a playful way addresses the issues that we have to face up to. Great ideas are no longer protected as the “Holy Grail”, whereby the majority of them eventually disappear into a drawer.

Thought structures in which a great idea is protected, and with which a person can set himself apart from other competitors, is a thing of the past. New media are leading rather to a situation where the world is becoming ever smaller. While we sometimes tend to see that as a problem, it actually offers fantastic potential, as the cloudscap.es competition has shown.

If we want to take the challenges of the coming decades seriously, then we need an open, multi-disciplinary and international exchange of ideas. Architects, engineers, manufacturers etc. will identify more than ever with developing an idea to become a product (building).