Today as a society, we are more than ever connected to the world. What’s even true is that, the more hyper connected we get as a society, we are constantly getting more disconnected. Thanks to all the enticing mobile apps and high speed internet connections – we have almost bypassed the need of going out of our homes. And at the other end of the spectrum lies worse, people needing rehabs these days to get away from their devices. Smartphones and all of the internet are battling for our attention today.
In this battle of attention, what gets left behind are our real-world interactions with real humans. This might look manageable for us – but the next generation are more susceptible to these devices and their lucrative offerings. This leads to less physical activity and less cognitive skill building, which in away aggravates the problem. The less social we get, the more we give into these pseudo interactions that will take over all the remaining of our wake time. The less social we get, the less sociable we become.
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One of the oldest element that brought people together was a small campfire at the end of a day – where stories, ideas & experiences were exchanged. It didn’t matter what people did during the day, these small pockets of interactions during the night, helped people create values, cultures & civilizations. Through time, cities have scaled impossibly large there are not many rooms of dialogues. The night life in urban areas work quite contrary to these past times in comparison. As cities grow more and more unsafe, night lives have been officially labelled as the places where accidents happen or where the cities are least friendly.
The design brief is to re-interpret a campfire at an urban level that has the ability to bring people together through a fresher experiences of a public space at night. The design questions for this challenge are as follows:
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- How can our public spaces fight back, with more vibrant experiences in the night?
- Can there be new pockets of dialogue in a public place whether inactive/active?
- Can there be new safer forms of nightlife where people can exchange experiences/engage in performances?
- Can light be used creatively to extract newer forms of experiences through these public spaces?
- Can there be public spaces – that have the ability to host a new night life at a town or a city level?
- Can these ideas add value to the space they inhibit in?
Participants have to exclusively use light as medium to solve/create/portray experiences. They can use architecture
partly – but the existing place shall not be overwritten by built forms. There are two ways you can solve this
challenge – A. Retrofit or B. Re-create
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The design brief is to “re-interpret a campfire at an urban level” , the challenge will evaluate the submission at 3 levels. The first part Document, will involve the participant to describe the selected locality in context of the city. Documentation can be done at various levels – Urban Planning, Architecture, Urban Design or even at detail level. This will help the jury to comprehend your intervention area and limits. The second part Analyze, will share all the primary design decisions and strategy that you have chosen for this intervention. The third part of the submission, Propose – will share all the new design interventions concisely based on Part 1 and Part 2.
You have to deliver an urban design outcome on the chosen site, based on the given outlines.
• A maximum 8 nos. – 5640px x 8640px sheet in portrait digital format (JPEG)
• Answer any 6 FAQ questions in the discussion section as given on the ‘Additional Resources Folder’.
This folder contains: FAQ Questions
Minimum requisites in the sheets (For a complete submission):
• Site plan (Compulsory)
• 3D views x 4
• Cover image of size 2000 x 1000 px or larger in aspect ratio 2:1..
• Floor plans, images, sketches (if any) can be added to support the entry.
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- Submission Deadline: August 05, 2019
- Public Voting begins: August 06, 2019
- Public Voting ends: September 06, 2019
- Result Announcement: September 16, 2019
Source and images Cortesy of COMMUN.