Alternate realities 2022
Meet the Winners
FIRST
Lau Yee Mun, Ang Hui Yi, Melissa Ho Er Shwen & Chia Hui Yen
Malaysia
AR2022-8681
SECOND
Lingas Tran & Grant Li
Australia
AR2022-8810
THIRD
Anik Kumar Chanda, Mohika Proma Sikder, Tanzid Noor Rafi & Md. Tanvir Ahmed Kintu
Bangladesh
AR2022-8595
First Prize winners
We met in high school and shared the same dream of architecture. We are currently pursuing our BArch at TsingHua University and Tianjin University. Even though we are from different universities, with similar interests, we formed a design team to participate in various competitions to enrich our experiences and improve together.
Apparently, climate change is one of the biggest challenges that we are facing now. We were thinking of developing a series of “healing buildings” that specifically functioned to clean and purge pollutants on earth. So, we were inspired by the principles of medical treatments that are used on the human body nowadays, we tried to treat the earth as a human patient and develop the pollutants-purging buildings as a special kind of medical apparatus.
We think architecture is a space that shelters humans in the first place. Architecture can’t be judged only by its appearance, more often than not, we like space is because of the people who live in it, or the good memories we have of it. An architect is the one who creates the opportunity for humans to interact with spaces. Therefore, the role of an architect is not only to design buildings that meet the functional needs of human beings, but more importantly, to act as a balance between the man-made and natural world.
Participating in Architectural Competitions is important to young architects like us as they provide opportunities to rethink and explore infinite possibilities of architecture. We will be given challenging and creative topics that differ from ordinary projects and while in the design process our creativity will be stimulated. Besides arousing our potential, we could also broaden our horizons by learning from other competitors who are talented architects that share an interest with us from all around the world yet gather together thanks to competitions held. Architecture Competitions are where fantasies get to be expressed with no limitations.
Second Prize winners
Lingas Tran & Grant Li
Grant and Lingas are both recent graduates of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Grant has a Master of Architecture and Lingas a Master of Urban Design. Lingas is also a current tutor in the Master of Interior Design program at RMIT University.
The Climate Crisis has always been embedded and a strong focus within their education and practice as emerging designers. The particular issue within the theme was prompted by a news article that had detailed the witness accounts of the rapidly melting Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica.
The ambition for the project is not to cast the audience into fear or panic with no sense of hope. On the contrary, it’s used to sober the audience’s judgement about what is really important by instilling convincing images of an alternative reality of a post-apocalyptic world.
Grant and Lingas both consider architecture and urban design as an expanded practice, it’s a way of thinking and intervening in the process of how humans inhabit and experience their environment. And so, it is the role of the designer to be conscious of their impact on the natural world.
Architecture competitions provide opportunities to work on various exciting projects and briefs with peers all over the world. And because it’s fun!
Third Prize winners
We four met each other in BArch 1st Year at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), Dhaka. We just completed level-2, term-1 of our architecture program.
We were discussing a few ideas in the beginning about how architecture can contribute to global issues regarding climate change or warfare. As day by day, our environment is engulfed by pollution. one of the main reasons for this situation is the overconsumption of material goods and various hierarchies in human society. Then we have earned our proposal through an article and a novel.
Inspired by Dmitry Glukhovsky’s novel Metro 2033, in which humanity’s last hope lies in Russian metro stations after a nuclear apocalypse. We then imagined what would happen if humanity went underground? how do we approach them? And we came across an article about an ancient rock that was half human and half mantis. So we took ants as our research subject and
showed genetically modification of humans into M. A. N. T. S. to improve their chances of survival.
As a result, we decided on an alternate world in which humans must adopt the survival skills of ants and spread underground urbanism. In the context of global issues, we imagine that our current architectural creation is vanishing. In another way, it entered a new era of architecture.
So we wanted to show an alternate reality where humans no longer prioritize identifying themselves as individuals, but they work as a team to make the world liveable again. It is also a message that we believe humans have the ability to resist extinction, and we introduced architecture as a key to this.
Architecture is the art of creating spaces, spaces that reflect the current society and help reimagine a better one. As we are at the beginning of our academic architectural journey, architecture takes the learnings from nature and uses that knowledge to design impactful spaces.
Design is all about decisions and architects can have a long-term impact on a large group of people who subconsciously absorb the ideology of an architect who designed their surroundings. Thus the role of an architect in our society is to influence people to live better through design.
Architectural competitions are a great way to exercise one’s creative muscles and learn to collaborate. Academic projects are encouraging to dive deep into but it often strips the creative freedom due to their materialistic approach. Competitions challenge to go beyond the fun and limitless territory of academic and real-world architectural rhythm