Architects are essentially artists or storytellers who revolutionize the building industry to make for society; architecture that is beyond functional beauty. Good architecture is an experience. But just as books, some of the best stories are woven through escapism. Detachment from reality tends to fabricate bold, beautiful, and unrealistic fantasy architecture ( at least for the present-day! ).
Here are 5 fantasy architecture competitions:
1. Fairy Tales: When architecture tells a story
Although Blank Space’s fairy tales competition is open to all – engineers, illustrators, or creatives in general – we have to highlight how it calls itself ‘the first architecture storytelling competition’. Started by architect Matthew Hoffman and journalist Francesca Giuliana, it aims to encourage an engagement between displayed design and its audience. Using a series of 5 images to depict narrations that challenge the imagination, communication, and fundamental design process.
Pierre Michael Monjardin and Andrew Galano
2. Laka Competition
Started in 2015, LakaReacts is a competition organized by the Lake Foundation focusing on improving social scenarios via architecture and design. It asks contenders to cross interdisciplinary boundaries and deduce solutions for environmental or social conditions, that sometimes maybe unpredictable while keeping in mind the safety of the design’s inhabitants.
The competition has had esteemed participants and jurors as Toyo Ito of Toyo Ito & associates, Qun Dang of MAD Architects as well as Kiesler Prize winner Yona Friedman.
3. The Home Competition
Home is not a place but a feeling, they say. But in today’s day and age when consumerism is the dominant religion and premium real estate is the holy grail, if an unrestrictive brief that has no limitations on scale and shape to fit economic requisites is a gorgeous dream.
The home competition does just that!
Setting a designer free from the daily riff-raff clientele, whispering constantly about budget constraints, to create a place that can be deemed as home. Flexibility with respect to the site, scale, the family composition of the inhabitants as well as the structural condition of the building is given, although, participants are asked to keep in mind what a home is – a place with unconditional affection amongst members, a sense of ownership, stability, and privacy. In addition, asking them to ensure clarity of how residents will interact with the design sitting in a specific context.
4. Unfuse Moontrip
With Elon Musk on the verge of commercializing space travel, the profession of architecture has already started gearing up for the future of urban regeneration away from planet Earth. Empathizing with the current diligence of significant scientists, once again public interests are diverted towards space travel.
Unfuse launched a moon trip as a competition drawn out for the similar purpose of inspiring young kids and educating them on the field of space exploration. The challenge posed by this competition is to design a space center with kids as its primary user. Although there is no such ‘fantasy’ component to this competition, we thought it would be important to name this one as for one, the idea of space travel is fantasy itself for most of us! At least till Musk succeeds.
5. Ideas Forward: 24h competition
A big chunk of architects end up being planners and since utopian societies serve as a muse to building architects and planners alike; ideas forward present 24h competition. On its 31st edition, it announced its gloriously dramatic subject ‘babel’. Babel means a confused noise made by multiple voices but then there is also the tower of babel is a biblical city where God’s plan was to induce multiple languages into the cooperative, monolingual society of builders in order to essentially ‘piss people off’ and simmer down the consequence of their ambition.
Ideas forward has built its base through countless (no, 31) such topics where mythology, escapism, and predictions of the future build fantasy architecture.
