digdoi
12-01-2006, 16:28
The Steedman Fellowship, granted since 1925, is awarded biannually on the basis of an International Design Competition. The Competition is supported by an endowment given to the Washington University School of Architecture in honor of James Harrison Steedman, who received a degree in mechanical engineering from Washington University in 1889, and was killed in active duty during World War I. The memorial was established by Steedman's widow, Mrs. Alexander Weddel, and Steedman's brother, George.
The Steedman Traveling Fellowship enables graduates of accredited professional degree programs in architecture around the world to travel for architectural research and study in foreign countries for a period of nine months. The $30,000 Fellowship is awarded to the winner of the Steedman International Design Competition. The award is based on the quality of the selected winner's competition design entry, but the quality of his/her research proposal is also considered.
Candidates must be graduates of an accredited school of architecture, and be currently employed in, or have completed at least one year of practical experience in the office of a practicing architect. Candidates are eligible to compete for up to eight years after receipt of their professional degrees, regardless of age. Citizens of all countries are eligible to compete for the Fellowship.
Registration Deadline
February 1, 2006
Program Published
February 3, 2006
Submission Deadline
March 13, 2006
Jury meeting & Announcement of Award
March 20, 2006
Competition Brief
In the contemporary landscape nothing can arise exclusively at the side of the humans. The political orientation we assign to nature, to the non-humans, today does not only partake of the picturesque tradition of the genius loci but also has given it a drastic twist in implicitly establishing a new program. The public space is not only a place where humans collectively fulfil themselves, the Greek polis; it is above all a place where they establish a new forum, an encounter between the non-humans and the humans, a place where we recognize each other, mix ourselves and accept each other; a cosmic forum with dimensions yet to be explored. From this point of view, architecture becomes receptive to completely new ways of conceiving its relation with the natural environment. The defining of new typologies, of observatories from which to widen our vision and put the physical environment in touch with culture, is transformed into a primary objective, the development of which has only been lightly anticipated by typological modalities of intensification and revelation which involve explicit references for contemporary architecture.
Through these observatories, from which we accede a communication between humans and non-humans, we can also understand the joint implication of architecture and landscape in the construction of new public spaces understood as a genuine conglomerate or amalgam; an "architecture for those who seek knowledge", according to Nietzsche's well known expression, which allows to exceed the conventional notion of a museum or a palace and to turn the wish expressed by Nietzsche into fact: " There will come a day - maybe very soon - when it will be recognized what our big cities are lacking of: silent places, vast and spacious for meditation, places with large crystal galleries for days with rain and sunshine, to which neither reaches the noise of the car nor the proclamations of the traders [...] buildings and constructions which express in their whole the sublime of meditation and the moving away from the world [...] we wish to see ourselves translated into stone and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll around these buildings and gardens."
The research about the observatory idea is crucial in this respect. An observatory is not a vantage-point, which leads to an experience or immediate perception. It's a place in which through the mediation of technology, of different techniques, one manages to establish a dialogue with nature that transmits the primary, innocent experience of perception into knowledge. Hence, this observatory concept especially interests us because it involves a typology in which technology, nature and architecture interact so as to intensify the dialogue between man and world, each one adopting the role that befits him in contemporary culture. The observatory is thus a topological mechanism, a form of mechanization and a way of relating nature and culture that embraces in a single gesture the traditional typologies of skyscrapers, the museum and the parliament, in also redefining the forms in which architecture has interacted with the park in the picturesque and modern tradition. The observatory is a way of relating pragmatist tradition–technological in kind–to the picturesque tradition–plastic in kind–both of them underlying yet differentiated from the main current of positivist modernism.
WEBSITE (http://www.steedmancompetition.com/index.lasso?pgID=1)
The Steedman Traveling Fellowship enables graduates of accredited professional degree programs in architecture around the world to travel for architectural research and study in foreign countries for a period of nine months. The $30,000 Fellowship is awarded to the winner of the Steedman International Design Competition. The award is based on the quality of the selected winner's competition design entry, but the quality of his/her research proposal is also considered.
Candidates must be graduates of an accredited school of architecture, and be currently employed in, or have completed at least one year of practical experience in the office of a practicing architect. Candidates are eligible to compete for up to eight years after receipt of their professional degrees, regardless of age. Citizens of all countries are eligible to compete for the Fellowship.
Registration Deadline
February 1, 2006
Program Published
February 3, 2006
Submission Deadline
March 13, 2006
Jury meeting & Announcement of Award
March 20, 2006
Competition Brief
In the contemporary landscape nothing can arise exclusively at the side of the humans. The political orientation we assign to nature, to the non-humans, today does not only partake of the picturesque tradition of the genius loci but also has given it a drastic twist in implicitly establishing a new program. The public space is not only a place where humans collectively fulfil themselves, the Greek polis; it is above all a place where they establish a new forum, an encounter between the non-humans and the humans, a place where we recognize each other, mix ourselves and accept each other; a cosmic forum with dimensions yet to be explored. From this point of view, architecture becomes receptive to completely new ways of conceiving its relation with the natural environment. The defining of new typologies, of observatories from which to widen our vision and put the physical environment in touch with culture, is transformed into a primary objective, the development of which has only been lightly anticipated by typological modalities of intensification and revelation which involve explicit references for contemporary architecture.
Through these observatories, from which we accede a communication between humans and non-humans, we can also understand the joint implication of architecture and landscape in the construction of new public spaces understood as a genuine conglomerate or amalgam; an "architecture for those who seek knowledge", according to Nietzsche's well known expression, which allows to exceed the conventional notion of a museum or a palace and to turn the wish expressed by Nietzsche into fact: " There will come a day - maybe very soon - when it will be recognized what our big cities are lacking of: silent places, vast and spacious for meditation, places with large crystal galleries for days with rain and sunshine, to which neither reaches the noise of the car nor the proclamations of the traders [...] buildings and constructions which express in their whole the sublime of meditation and the moving away from the world [...] we wish to see ourselves translated into stone and plants, we want to take walks in ourselves when we stroll around these buildings and gardens."
The research about the observatory idea is crucial in this respect. An observatory is not a vantage-point, which leads to an experience or immediate perception. It's a place in which through the mediation of technology, of different techniques, one manages to establish a dialogue with nature that transmits the primary, innocent experience of perception into knowledge. Hence, this observatory concept especially interests us because it involves a typology in which technology, nature and architecture interact so as to intensify the dialogue between man and world, each one adopting the role that befits him in contemporary culture. The observatory is thus a topological mechanism, a form of mechanization and a way of relating nature and culture that embraces in a single gesture the traditional typologies of skyscrapers, the museum and the parliament, in also redefining the forms in which architecture has interacted with the park in the picturesque and modern tradition. The observatory is a way of relating pragmatist tradition–technological in kind–to the picturesque tradition–plastic in kind–both of them underlying yet differentiated from the main current of positivist modernism.
WEBSITE (http://www.steedmancompetition.com/index.lasso?pgID=1)