The Mid-Polis: The 2011 Open-Building Competition Challenge

This is a student competition for current students of any discipline. Winners will receive monetary awards and stipends to attend the Architecture in the Fourth Dimension Conference taking place November 15-17, 2011 in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

See http://www.open-building.org/conference2011/competition.html for more details.

As metropolises around the world continue to mature, the zones between their inner (historic) core and their outer (suburban) fringe evolve and mutate in many forms. This mid-polis condition represents a fruitful opportunity to re-define urban connections between center and edge. With that in mind, we have selected a site that is ripe for such a new intervention. The site is located in Somerville, Massachusetts, an “inner suburb” also closely tied to the City of Boston through history, future transit connections and existing infrastructure. This is the context for the competition challenge.

The competition asks entrants to consider how familiar and new urban patterns and building typologies can serve to redefine this mid-polis site. The selected urban pattern and building types for this site will face significant challenges in the 21st century. They must be at the same time stable, lovable, energy effective infrastructures of space and form, adaptable to inevitable changes of use or function. How will the proposed urban morphology and building types support changing programmatic, economic and societal forces over time while maintaining a coherent built form that does not become functionally and stylistically obsolete in 30 – 50 years? Thus, the key issue in this competition is the design of an urban fabric and more detailed design of one building type of enduring quality – so excellent that over 50 or more years, the uses and functions in the urban spaces and inside the buildings can change as cells are replenished in a living organism. That is the design
challenge.