LA+ ICONOCLAST Design Competition , New York / Vereinigte Staaten

LA+ ICONOCLAST Design Competition

Organizer
LA+ Interdisciplinary Journal
of Landscape Architecture
University of Pennsylvania School of Design
Meyerson Hall, 119
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Competition Contact
If you have a question please submit it to laplus@design.upenn.edu

The Competition
LA+ ICONOCLAST asks you to redesign New York’s Central Park, which has been fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists.

Central Park is arguably the canonical work of modern landscape architecture. Its aesthetic and socio-political ideals of health, beauty and democracy underpin the profession of landscape architecture, which Olmsted first named, to this day. Writing of the park in 1973, the artist Robert Smithson claimed that Olmsted “combined both art and reclamation in Central Park in a way that is truly in advance of his times.” But what would Olmsted do today? What will you do?

This competition asks that you redesign Central Park, starting, as Olmsted and Calvert Vaux did, from scratch. In doing so this competition seeks to explore the following questions:
1) If in parks, no matter how faux or superficial, we manifest a collective aesthetic expression of our relationship with the “natural” world, then what, on the occasion of nature’s disappearance, is the aesthetic of that relationship today?
2) What is the role of a large urban park today?
3) How might issues of aesthetics on the one hand and performance on the other coalesce into what Olmsted described as “a single work of art”?
4) Given the extraordinary history of the Central Park site, the competition asks how the new interprets the old, and how together, the new and the old anticipate the future.

In short, the brief is to create the concept for a new, 21st century Central Park. The brief asks for a plan, a short explanatory text, and discretionary supporting imagery. The competition favors conceptual rigor and imagination, and places a premium on engagement with the questions outlined above. Basic issues of feasibility, materiality, circulation, and programming will also be taken into consideration by the jury.

Competition Type
Open international design ideas competition

Participants
The competition is open to students and professionals from any discipline and from anywhere in the world.
No professional qualifications are required to enter.

Schedule
Submission deadline: October 10, 2018 at 11.59 EDT (New York, USA time)
Winners announced: November 27, 2018
Winners + select entries will be published in the LA+ ICONOCLAST issue in Fall 2019

Jury
- Richard Weller – Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
- Jenny B. Osuldsen – Partner and director of Snøhetta
- Charles Waldheim – John E. Irving Professor and Director, Office for Urbanization at Harvard University Graduate School of Design
- Lola Sheppard – Founding partner of Lateral Office and Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada
- Geoff Manaugh – Freelance writer, author of the New York Times-bestselling book A Burglar’s Guide to the City (2016), and former director of Studio-X NYC
- Beatrice Galilee – Daniel Brodsky Associate Curator of Architecture and Design at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York

Awards
US $20,000 total prize money
- 5 winners to receive US$4,000, a certificate, and publication in LA+ Journal’s LA+ ICONOCLAST issue
- 10 honorable mentions to receive a certificate and publication in LA+ Journal’s LA+ ICONOCLAST issue

More information and details at
laplusjournal.com/ICONOCLAST-Competition