The Finnish capital Helsinki is undergoing the busiest phase of development in the city’s history. Whole new districts are emerging in sites vacated from harbours and other industrial uses. As a key part of the development, the City of Helsinki envisions landmark bridges – Kruunusillat (“crown bridges”) – for trams, cyclists and pedestrians. These bridges will connect a new maritime residential district with the inner city. The City invites the best architectural and engineering experts from all around the world for the task.

DesignByMany is a challenge based design technology community sponsored by HP and ArchDaily. Users post challenges to the community along with their design source files. The community can then post responses with their own source files to solve the challenge. They can also comment on the challenge and interact with other designers throughout the process.

As designers we not only need to think about how we can originate buildings, we need to think about how we can use existing structures to accommodate new types of building programs. This challenge is to design a pedestrian bridge between to two existing buildings.

More information after the break.

The City of Helsinki is organizing an open international competition for ideas for Helsinki’s South Harbour. The entrants’ task is to create a comprehensive ideas plan for the South harbour that can be used as a basis for the future development of the area. The competition area is the entire shore area of the South Harbour. The central location of the South Harbour, the area’s cultural history and the passanger ports are essential parts of the city identity. The South Harbour is Helsinki’s marine national landscape. For more information, visit the competition’s official website.

The New Zealand team from Victoria University of Wellington is the first-ever finalist from the Southern Hemisphere in the US Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. The team is led by students from Victoria’s School of Architecture and is made up of students from a range of disciplines across the university. New Zealand is the first country in the world to see the light each day, this gave the house its name— First Light.

By integrating solar power systems in the roof or façades of buildings in an architecturally and technically sophisticated manner, architects can increase the awareness of both builders and the public regarding the possibilities for combining buildings with solar technology, and thus help renewable energies become more widespread. To increase acceptance and to foster awareness of this topic, the Bavarian Association for the Promotion of Solar Energy (SeV Bayern) is organising the competition “Building-Integrated Solar Technology2011”.

The Brooklyn-based design and fabrication studio, FLATCUT_, in conjunction with the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (“ACADIA”), are pleased to announce this year’s award-winning jurors for The ACADIA 2011 Design + Fabrication Competition. The international competition asks designers to “push the boundaries of materials, minds, and machine” by exploring emergent modes of computational design. The competition focuses on unique material combinations and new fabrication techniques in creating forms in three categories: Furniture, Lighting and Partition. Winners will get the opportunity to actually fabricate their proposals this summer at FLATCUT_’s incredible 100,000sf warehouse.

In ancient times we lived with the Wilderness, fighting against its severity and its roughness, and receiving the benefits of its fertility. The wildness of nature was directly related to our lives. In our current age, we live in cities. A city is a large, man-made environment, in which we no longer think much about the power of nature, except when we are shocked by occasional natural disasters, such as storms, floods, droughts and earthquakes. However, we still instinctively recall the lives of our ancestors, and have complex feelings of fear and yearning for life in the Wilderness.

The Horbury Hunt Award recognises excellence and innovation in built projects. Also recognising the collaboration of a project team to deliver architectural outcomes. The Award rewards innovation and craftsmanship in brickwork and recognises the contribution of all parties in that process. The Horbury Hunt Awards includes commercial as well as residential and landscape built projects.

The Rio 2016 Olympic and Para-Olympic games, together with other large events scheduled for upcoming years, such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2011 Military Games, generate enormous opportunities for the development of Rio de Janeiro. The Rio 2016 Olympic and Para-Olympic Games represent a celebration of sports and will be a source of transformation for the city, promoting an environmental, architectural, cultural and sustainable economy legacy, benefiting the urban environment and the quality of life of citizens.

This is an international ideas competition to establish a design for the Busan Opera House to construct in 2014. The design will be based on a variety of ideas from both domestic and foreign specialists, as well as student groups. The opera house will include a variety of facilities that will foster a wide range of artistic activities all the while being accessible to the city’s citizens. The grand scale of this project will be suitable for Busan’s status as an international city.

There are a number of public events available throughout the duration of the 5 days. A symposium will be held at BMW Edge on Tuesday 26 July. The opening ceremony will take place on Wednesday 27 July at the Docklands. The announcement of the winners will take place at the Docklands on Saturday 30 July. Various commentary and guides will be occurring throughout the event. For more information, please click here.

The paradigmatic Praça de Lisboa, at the core of Porto Historical Centre, seems to be of greater relevance to launch a first debate about interventions in public space, promoting, simultaneously, a global reflection about the process of city’s rehabilitation and about our participation as citizens in that process. Launching an Ideas Competition to Praça de Lisboa, under the name NO RULES, GREAT SPOT: WANTED, IDEAS FOR PRAÇA DE LISBOA (No rules, great spot, is a sentence written on a wall of this space) seems, in this sense, a fundamental action, able to provoke an in-tensive and ex-tensive debate around urban rehabilitation as a shared and informed, participated and discussed city project.

The Intergrain Timber Vision Awards are back in 2011, inviting architects, landscapers and designers nationwide to showcase their visionary use of timber in residential and commercial design projects. With the chance to showcase your work in front of a prestigious industry audience, the awards now cover five categories including: Residential Interior, Residential Exterior, Commercial Interior, Commercial Exterior and Young Architects (under 30 years of age).

Participation is open to all graduates of architecture and engineering faculties coming from all over the world. The theses, made individually or in groups, must have been discussed in the period between January 1, 2009 and October 31, 2011.

This year’s ACADIA 2011 Annual Conference, with the support of FLATCUT_, seeks proposals for innovative geometric forms that push the limits of design through the exploration of integrative material strategies for digitally fabricated assemblies. The competition hopes to address the questions that parametric design models are pose in terms of material practice: How does parametric design engage changes scale? How does the selection, tooling, and deployment of material shape the physical environment? How do inventive material pairings work positively and cohesively to produce new forms of assembly and environmental response? How do designers begin to embed parameters that engage concepts of sustainability, augmented performance and material flexibility?

JAJA Architects just shared the news of their competiton proposal for an extension of Falkonergården High School in Frederiksberg, Denmark. The competition attracted over one hundred proposals, and JAJA’s placed third for its “…respectful relation to the existing buildings through its geometric formal language”. The jury explained, “The shape appears logic with an interpretation of the buildings existing virtues. And the objective of capturing the warm glow of the surrounding buildings with new materials seems very convincing.”

More images and more about the extension after the break.  

Modern Atlanta (MA) is pleased to announce the first annual Modern Atlanta Prize 2011 competition. The prize intends to highlight talented designers and their projects each year under a new and interesting theme.

Carlsberg Group hereby announces an international design competition to transform the New Carlsberg Brewhouse into an exciting, must-see Brand and Experience Centre, attracting 500,000 visitors each year.

The central idea behind this challenge is that the project in question is a “virtual project”, one that has been created specifically for this competition.

Christian Pottgiesser architecturespossibles recently shared with us their entry for the Russian Orthodox Center in Paris. Read about their proposal and view their renderings and video after the break.

They seek other geo-political border ‘hot spots’ in and out of the Political Equator that need to be interpreted and engaged. These geographies of conflict need to be understood through the radicalization of the existing in order to imagine new models of the possible. For more information please visit the competition’s official website.

Parramatta City Council is officially on the hunt for the boldest, most innovative and creative thinkers to present their vision for an iconic site along the scenic Parramatta River foreshore as part of an international ideas competition, ‘Ideas on Edge’. Prize money of $50,000 is on offer for a commercially viable idea for the site located at a prime position on the edge of Parramatta River, with the competition open to people of all ages and backgrounds from around the world.

London is the largest urban zone in the European Union with a cosmopolitan population of over 7.7 million residence. The London Games is being eagerly anticipated by millions of sporting fans around the world. The Games, which officially kicks off on the 27th July 2012 will see the arrival of world’s top athletes and their team officials representing various participating nations, international dignitaries, the Games officials and not to mention millions of supporters and fans.

March 8 marked the beginning of voting for the best student architectural project that will revive the Fužine neighborhood in Slovenia’s capital, Ljubljana. Until March 23, visitors to the competition website can vote for the 30 short-listed projects, selected from among all 363 submitted projects by the international ten-member expert jury. The winning solution will be released on location this summer and announced on March 28. More images and competition description after the break.