BEACON >>>

An interview with Dr Osama Farag Talking about architecture competitions and how to think in a concept .
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 3-2
Part 4-1
Part 4-2
Part 5

for more : en.mansouraarc.net

REGISTRATION DEADLINE January 4, 2010          SUBMISSION DEADLINE January 15, 2010

         Exploration of housing typologies reveals vast potential for overlaying urban, contextual, cultural, social, and life cycle flows toward determining new architectonic strategies for living in the future. The d3 Housing Tomorrow Competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.
The competition calls for transformative solutions that advance sustainable thought, building performance, and social interaction through study of intrinsic environmental geometries, social behaviors, urban implications, and programmatic flows. Special emphasis may be placed on housing concepts that investigate dialogues including engagement of internal/external socio-economic diversity, change/adaptability over time, public/private realm connectivity, and permanence/impermanence of materiality. d3 challenges participants to rethink strategies for investigating residential design from macro-to-micro scales ranging from urban—promoting broader physical interconnectivity; communal—exploiting an interaction of units with shared facilities; and internal—examining the interior particularity of the unit, individual, or family in housing design toward promoting identity, ownership, and intimacy.

The Competition website

       The ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition is a graduate-level annual competition that is intended to provide an interdisciplinary learning experience for real estate and design students in the United States and Canada. Self-formed student teams are asked to provide an urban design and a financial feasibility strategy for a large-scale real life site that ULI has identified somewhere in the United States. Through the formation of multidisciplinary teams, the program encourages cooperation and teamwork among future real estate professionals and the many allied professions, such as architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, engineering, real estate development, finance, psychology, law, and others.
 This year’s site, to be announced on January 19, 2009, will be large scale and present complex challenges, needing practicable, innovative solutions that reflect responsible land use. The solutions incorporate design, planning, market potential and feasibility, and development strategies. The submission to the competition will be presentation drawings, tables, schedules, and text.

The seventh annual ULI Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition is part of the Institute’s ongoing effort to raise interest among young people in creating better communities, improving development patterns, and increasing awareness of the need for multidisciplinary solutions to development and design challenges. This competition is an ideas competition; there is no guarantee or expectation that any of the submitted schemes will be applied to the site. The winning team receives $50,000 and the finalist teams $10,000 each.

The competition website

The architectural group is about to be integrated . the way to professionalism is always long with lots of obstacles .. so , there must be a guide along this way .. here comes the idea to set up a Beacon .
Our Beacon is very flexible , interactive , talking , very up-to-date and very deep-rooted

• November-2009 activities ..
  The WORKSHOP .. from november 2009 - to february 2010
• Activities
  - digital fabrications .
  - architectural technologies .
  - sustainable solutions