UPDATE: Due to public demand, Storefront and the New Museum have extended deadlines, expanded eligibility, and require less documentation. Check out the revised brief here, and be sure to register by the 21st of January.
via Storefront for Art and Architecture
Mark your calendars: The Festival of Ideas for a New City will debut during the weekend of May 7-8, 2011. The Festival is a collaborative initiative between a number of downtown organizations (including the Architectural League), spearheaded by the New Museum, to demonstrate the power of the creative community to imagine the city of the future. Artists, architects, designers and other thought leaders will exchange ideas, propose solutions, create new problems and invite the public to participate in improving urban life.
In May, the Festival will offer panels, roundtables, symposia, worshops, an outdoor street fair and dozens of projects, performances and events opening simultaneously at various downtown venues. The Bowery will be the spine of the Festival, with Cooper Union and the New Museum serving as hubs for conversation, learning and action. But you don’t have to wait until spring to get involved. For the occasion, Storefront for Art and Architecture, jointly with the New Museum and the NYC Department of Transportation, has launched the StreetFest competition.
StreetFest is a competition for the design, management and construction of temporary outdoor spaces that produce new ways for collective gathering and city engagement. One winning entry will be fabricated along the Bowery and on the streets surrounding the New Museum during the Festival in May — detailed site specifications are intentionally limited, to encourage a “site-less typology” that is not limited by a particular site. These temporary outdoor structures will be home to outdoor classrooms, installations, music, vendors, workshops, demonstrations, performances and exhibitions.
From the Storefront website:
The Challenge
Prefabricated tenting structures have proliferated in the last years as the only solution to temporary affordable outdoor shelter. The resulting landscape of street fairs or temporary events throughout cities and neighborhoods has been a spatially, geometrically, chromatically, and materially homogeneous environment that simply enables activities to happen without generating a playful engagement with the city or its citizens.
This competition asks for designs that envision street tents not only as shelters but also as active elements within the collective construction and understanding of the city. StreetFest makes a call to Architects, Artists and Engineers to re-envision the performativity-the material, social, and educational possibilities-of temporary outdoor structures.
The winning entry will have these characteristics:
1. Aspires to reinvent the typical street fair tent
2. Is modular; one unit can become three can become seven, providing scalability and the ability to go from an intimate platform to a larger one
3. Is conscientious of the materials used and their impact on the environment
4. Is easy to produce and install; if time allows, there is opportunity to produce additional structures
The selected project will work closely with the StreetFest Task Force committee and will be commissioned to produce, construct, install, and disassemble the final design.
The registration deadline is January 14, 2011 January 21st, 2011. For more details about the competition, including submission requirements and project schedule, click here.
