CIRT CHALLENGE: Design a Playground or Playscape

CHALLENGE BRIEF

This challenge seeks to find exciting proposals to transform neglected parts of urban areas/cities into interactive landscapes, encouraging public engagement, community involvement, and sustainable adaptive reuse. It asks teams to provide a design/construction solution, which advocates creativity and promotes outside activity, increasing socialization, and interaction. Teams should site their proposals in an abandoned or forgotten urban site, and develop a new era playground or playscape that creates opportunity for interaction and play for citizens of all ages.

Gather as much information as possible about your chosen location’s topography, climate and primary audiences. Site selection is critical and must be fully explained. Show a before and after photo.

Upload images, notes, sketches, land use maps and other helpful resources that show your thinking. You can leave notes for your team in the comment section.

As ideas come together, upload sketches, floor plans, bubble diagrams, aerial maps, material studies or prototype models of your initial ideas.

Brainstorm materials, building techniques, structural elements and approaches that emphasize sustainability, energy efficiency, and recyclable eco-friendly products.

Take your preliminary ideas and form multiple small-scale design solutions. Create digital or physical models that help articulate your more developed ideas. Discuss them as a team and make final decisions.

Demonstrate specifically how using construction elements (including work flow/time lines, etc.) will achieve the challenge’s goals.

Explain the dimensions, size, costs, materials, etc. determined by the team. All decisions should be explained and warranted based on the real world resources likely to be used for such a proposal. Provide a square foot cost estimate.

Thoroughly describe your design process, in writing and through visuals (e.g., sketches, renderings, stepped process, before and after, budgets, timelines, etc.) that meet the precise or exact nature of the challenge and/or the client goals/needs.

Think About:

Explain how your design approach is an appropriate, innovative solution that realistically responds to the precise design competition problem.

Explain how your design is different from other approaches or processes, if such is the case. How does your design address budgetary constraints, timeline issues or other challenges? Describe and/or demonstrate what you learned from this design competition.

The following design and construction aspects will be jury evaluation criteria, and should be explained where appropriate:

• site selection and its context (built and/or natural)
• constructability (structural challenges, materials, textures, colors, etc.)
• strategy for sustainability
• surrounding landscape/external spaces
• life and activities, in and around the building, including the qualities of enclosed spaces showing furniture, fittings and finishes

Upload your final images, text and renderings.