d3 Announces Winners of 2016 Natural Systems Competition

Written by Rory Stott
Published on December 26, 2016

Awarding the top ecological projects of the year, d3 has announced this year’s winners of its Natural Systems competition. Established in 2009, the annual competition has grown into one of the most notable awards in speculative, performance-based design. The brief challenges architects, designers, engineers, and students to develop ideas for sustainable living by exploring natural processes. This year’s program was co-directed by Ji Young Kim of Shigeru Ban Architects and Gregory Marinic of the Syracuse University School of Design.

Read on to find out about the jury’s picks for the top three projects and seven special mentions.

First Prize: Hydrological Cluster / Anna Budnikova (Russia)

The Hydrological Cluster is dedicated to one of the natural environment’s most global problems—water resource depletion and rising sea levels. Climatic disasters and anthropogenic impact cause a gradual depletion of water resources. Biomimicry is a modern response to global environmental problems.

Second Prize: ABIOGENESIS 0.1 / Georgia Skartadou & Christos Nasioutzikis (Greece)

Self-reproducing automata is a process of design that occurs after a theoretical investigation about the intercourses and the exclusions between dipoles—subject and object, natural and artificial, intention and randomness, design and not-design. The design tools that are chosen are non-dimensional points. The design shifts from the conceived object to the processes that materialize the object. The main principles that are finally chosen are those that condense the phenomenon of life (movement, metabolic exchanges, reproduction).

Third Prize: Delta Raefiguratoria / Jose Alberto Gonzalez Martin (Spain)

The Ebro Delta, one of the most unique productive landscapes in the Mediterranean Sea, is sinking. The massive construction of reservoirs all over the Ebro River basin in the 20th century has caused the sand needed to sustain the Delta to stay in the mountains. DELTA Raefiguratoria (Delta del Ebro Low Tech Architecture Reconfiguration) is an architectural treatise from the past for the future. With a retrofuturistic language, DELTA Raefiguratoria is meant to be a manifesto for low-tech architecture: for more than two thousand years it has achieved everything we know so far, why not give it a chance in this high-tech world to keep building our future?

Special Mention - Building Performance: Hybrid Skytree / Teymour Benet (Spain)