Animal Architecture Awards

Animal Architecture seeks exciting projects that engage the lives, minds and behaviors of our alternate, sometimes familiar companion species — insects, birds, mammals, fish and microorganisms – each one with unique ways of world-making. As our society re-examines its place in the global ecology Animal Architecture invites your critical and unpublished essays and projects to address how architecture can mediate and encourage multiple new ways of species learning and benefiting from each other – or as we say it here: to illustrate cospecies coshaping.

We believe that a greater understanding of biotic and ecological relationships can influence design, reshape our cities, and restructure our homes — benefiting the human and non-human animals that interact with and around them. The burgeoning field of Anthrozoology is quantifying the positive effects of actively engaging other animals in human life. More than just simply pets, how can this growing awareness of other species influence the way we shape the world?

Animal Architecture wants to hear your ideas. Animal Architecture (formed in 2009) is dedicated to providing a forum for addressing the myriad issues arising from the complex interactions between animals and human society. The lens of our focus is Architecture. The aim of our study is to again see ourselves as partners in an intimate and reciprocal relationship with larger (sometime smaller) ecological forces.

All creatures great and small. Submit your project to us. Submissions can include past work, current research and built or unbuilt projects.* Winning entries will be announced mid summer 2011 and will be eligible for inclusion in a publication and exhibition. Details to follow.

what: The Animal Architecture Awards
Register By: May 15th 2011
Deadline for submissions: June 12th 2011
cost: $25 Students, $50 Professionals
Register: www.animalarchitecture.org/register

Submission requirements:

1. Project Abstract (<250 words pitching your project)
2. Project Description (< 600 word detailed description/narrative of the proposed project)
3. Images/Boards (no more than 10 images or 5mb, which ever comes first, of your visual project)
4. Further details regarding uploading, file transfer and submission will be disseminated after registration.
5. Posters available for distribution can be downloaded at www.animalarchitecture.org.

*Projects cannot have appeared in previous publications and the entrant(s) must have exclusive rights to all content.

Jury Committee Members:

• Neeraj Bhatia, Wortham Fellow Rice University
• Ned Dodington, Founder Animal Architecture
• Allison Hunter, Visual Artist
• Joyce Hwang, Assistant Processor University of Buffalo SUNY, Director Ants of the Prairie
• Sanford Kwinter, Professor of Architectural Theory and Criticism, Harvard GSD
• Jon LaRocca, Founder Animal Architecture
• Geoff Manaugh, Author of BLDGBLOG
• Cary Wolfe, Professor of English at Rice University and Series Editor Posthumanities.

For more information about the distinguished jury and how to register visit: www.animalarchitecture.org/register.