Winners of the Competition of Competitions

The winners were finally revealed for Storefront's Competition of Competitions, where entrants got to question the boundaries and shortcomings of competition brief formats by writing their very own.

From the 18 finalists announced back in February, the jury picked 4 prize-winning projects, 7 honorable mentions, and a Storefront Special Prize. All selected projects will be publicized and given support to reach the pertinent agents and authorities. The Storefront Special Prize winner will get to run their submitted competition as part of the 2014 Storefront for Art and Architecture program calendar.

Check out excerpts of the winning briefs below.

1ST PLACE WINNER - US$2,000: Deploy Yourself, Not Your Designs
By The Coalition for the Improvement of Refugee Camps (Marcy Monroe & Lee Dykxhoorn)

The Question: "This should be the most relevant question your competition addresses. Only one question. This will be a major element of the document differentiating your competition from the others. How can design disrupt power structures in relief housing?

Competition Brief: "Today, over 45 million people around the globe live in harsh conditions in refugee or internally displaced persons camps overseen by relief agencies.  Although planned to be temporary, the average lifespan of these settlements is estimated by the United Nations to exceed 17 years and imprints lasting effects on the social structure and health of the inhabitants. Currently, camp design is guided by a short pamphlet published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

Although a certain amount of objectivity is expected through the administration of both non-governmental organizations and the UNHCR, the reality is that private actors and donors direct these guidelines through provision of consistent physical material and the human logistics necessary to deploy emergency shelter, food, and water in crisis situations. As relief operations are often a collaboration between organizing agencies, companies that make a profit off supplying the physical material, and the users on the ground, there can be a conflict between the economic and humanitarian aims of any relief project. As a result, operations are often both managed and designed from a distance, creating additional environmental, social, and health issues within camps.

Submit a plan for deploying new strategies for disaster response that show economic and social sustainability. This could be through the creation of a new set of guidelines for funding and material sourcing, camp based program approaches, or community integration strategies.  The aim is to design a community driven, systems approach to providing the platform for populations to partake in alternative ways of addressing everyday context-based issues that is less dependant on the global relief industry."

To read the full brief, click here.