Open Call: Q City Plan—Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition

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“Q City Plan—Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition" is now calling for entries from all university and college students worldwide who major in the fields such as urban planning, architecture design, landscape design, and artistic design, aiming to provide them a platform to show their talent based on the real built environment of Qinhuangdao as the foundation for their creation and inspiration. We hope to use this event to solicit creative ideas of microscopic renovation in public spaces and to find more possible paths for the regeneration of this famous port city of China in the future.

The following are some key points about the competition:

Competition Topic: Q City Plan—Qinhuangdao
Registration Deadline: 24:00(UTC+8) May 30th, 2018
Submission Deadline: 24:00(UTC+8) June 16th, 2018
Registration link: http://qcityplan_qhd.uedmagazine.net/en_sign.html

Awards

First Prize (1 team): Honor certificate + Bonus 100,000RMB (before tax, around 15,000USD)
Second Prize (4 teams): Honor certificate + Bonus 30,000RMB (before tax, around 4,500USD)
Third Prize (10 teams): Honor certificate + Bonus 10,000RMB (before tax, around 1,500USD)
Honorable Mentions (several teams): Honor certificate and full year UED magazine

Jury Chairman: Benedetta Tagliabue, the director of EMBT Miralles Tagliabue

Theme and Interpretation

“Q City Plan—Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition” can be seen as a new approach to make urban public spaces more intriguing through directly intervening in the small-scale environments instead of large-scale landscape axis, key areas or nodes, in order to complement the insufficient research and design on micro spaces in cities. “Q City Plan” is a new thought of people-oriented humanistic planning through a "trivial-to-grand" mechanism, which is expected to make a remedy for the traditional urban planning of macroscopic narrative. It is a government-initiated activity that involves people to be part of urban regeneration and development, which abandons large-scale demolition and building and respects the original urban texture at its best.

Features

1. Design Categories are various and flexible;
2. Low cost and high level of practicability;
3. Architects-dominated. Architects have rights to control all aspects of projects including designs, materials, constructions and costs.

Competition Requirements

Design Principles

1. Creativity: Create diverse and interesting places for Qinhuangdao citizens and tourists. Design must be original.
2. Locality: Project should be designed with a comprehensive consideration of local history, culture, and natural environment of Qinhuangdao with its geological features highlighted;
3. Sustainability: The sustainability of design, materials and operation should be considered.
4. Feasibility: This is not only a conceptual competition. The selection of material, the form of construction and the requirement of craftsmanship should all be feasible.
5. People-orientation: Designs should fully consider diverse needs of different groups of people and provide citizens and tourists in urban spaces for activities.

Design Categories

There are a variety of design categories for participants to choose. Public spaces where daily activities of citizens and tourists occur, such as town square plaza, block, roadside green space, bathing beach, public toilets and food markets can be designed into artistic installations, street furniture & installations and landscape scenes. Entries can be independent or in a series, however, unrelated multiple works are not allowed. It should be noticed that entry in a series is that under one certain theme, while production-oriented duplication is not encouraged (For more information about the requirements of site selection, please enter the official website http://qcityplan_qhd.uedmagazine.net/en_down.html to download).

Site

1. The competition committee provides several available sites for design; participants can select one from these sites. For related basic information about the sites please download from competition website;
2. Participants are also encouraged to select sites and definite design theme by themselves, discovering and finding solutions about urban issues with a bottom-up approach. Self-selected site should be real site in the city of Qinhuangdao. Photos, satellite images and videos of the site are required in submission materials. Participants are required to consult the organizing committee before making the final decision. Participants will be disqualified if they started design without acknowledge of the site by the organizing committee.
3. Whether the participants choose the provided site or self-selected site has no influence on the jury review. (The information of the provided site can be downloaded from the official website)

Organizers

This competition is sponsored by Hebei Provincial People’s Government and organized by Hebei Provincial Department of Housing & Urban-Rural Development, Qinhuangdao Municipal People’s government, Hebei Port Group Co., Ltd., and supported by Architectural Education Appraisal Subcommittee of Architectural Society of China with the Urban Environment Design (UED) Magazine as the planning and executive body of the whole event.

• Title

  Open Call: Q City Plan—Qinhuangdao International Student Design Competition

• Type

  Competition Announcement (Student Competitions)

• Organizers

  Urban Environment Design (UED) Magazine

• Registration Deadline

  May 31, 2018 12:00 AM

• Submission Deadline

  June 17, 2018 12:00 AM

• Price

  Free