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Contest Calls for Sustainable Entries

The winning entry, which will be chosen by jurors including William McDonough, Daniel Libeskind and Sarah Susanka, will be built in Virginia.

Meaghan O'Neill -- Interior Design, 10/12/2004 12:00:00 AM

A new housing competition, based on the revolutionary ideas of cradle-to-cradle to design, was announounced eariler this year. The C2C Home Design Competition challenges forward-thinking designers and students to create a home with the intention of achieving the new standards of sustainability as outlined in William McDonough and Michael Braungaurt's Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.

The cradle-to-cradle paradigm recognizes that material resources are finite and must be used and re-used without degradation in either technical or biological cycles. This means moving beyond standard strategies of efficiency in order to create systems in which complete separation and reuse of all construction materials is adopted. The goal of the contest is to decrease the quantity of consumer goods used in a cradle-to-grave manner, or bringing them in one end and discarding them at the other. The cradle-to-cradle concept attempts to eliminate "the modern invention of waste, which is unknown in nature", according the C2C Home Web site.

There are five guiding principles of the competition:

Design decisions must signal intention and express personal goals for the future of building and how that relates to the needs of the human culture to sustain itself.
The design must stop the process of taking and begin the process of giving.
Submissions must both reflect current thinking and also anticipate and incorporate the need to go further still.
Submissions must look ahead to the future, and be prepared for a "learning curve."
Submissions must exert intergenerational responsibility--that is, they must consider design as it relates to the future generations of people, animals, and all aspects of a biosphere.

The competition is open to professional architects and designers, students and university teams. Three winners in each category will receive cash awards, for $5,000, $3,000, and $1,000 each. Students and university teams will win internships as well. Special Recognition Awards will be made to other entries of outstanding merit.

Jurors for the contest include renowned experts Alexander Garvin, Daniel Libeskind, William McDonough, Randall Stout and Sarah Susanka.

And unlike many other competitions, the winning design will actually see construction in Roanoke, Virginia, beginning in Summer 2005. C2C Home expects this to be the first location of several national and international competitions.

Selected submissions will be posted online, constructed as funding allows and published in the competition catalogue. An Exhibition of Winners will be held also be held at the Art Museum of Western Virginia in January 2005.

The entry fee for professionals is $150, for students, $35; for university teams, registration is free. Registration ends November 15, 2004. The entry deadline is December 15. Judging will take place in January 2005. For more information, please visit C2C Home .