Architects and designers of interiors, fashion, products and graphics, you are cordially invited to enter your work into the 2008 International Design Awards. Professionals and students alike are encouraged to enter. Winners of IDA08 will be celebrated at a cocktail party and week-long reception in Los Angeles or New York in December 2008. In addition, the winners will receive pulication of their work in the 2008 International Design Awards book, to be distributed to museum bookstores nationwide; promotion in email blasts to 100,000 design professionals and potential clients worldwide; year-long coverage on the International Design Awards Web site; critical acclaim by a distinguished panel of judges. Finally, all entrants are automatically included in the IDA Designer Directory.

Deadline is 30 August 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

The Terner Prize is being inaugurated to commemorate Don Terner on the tenth anniversary of his death. It will be awarded biennially to the affordable housing project and leadership team that best exemplifies the spirit of Don Terner’s work, commitment to affordable housing.

One winner will be chosen to receive the First Prize Award of $25,000. Five finalist teams will be awarded leadership stipends of $5,000 so that they may “light the light” for the next generation of leaders in the affordable housing industry by participating in conferences, seminars, or colloquia.

A jury to select the finalists and winning team is comprised of people from the fields of planning, architecture, development, finance, government, academia and media. They are chosen for their demonstrated integrity, expertise and commitment to the guiding principals of the Terner Prize.

The Terner Prize is administered by the Center for Community Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley. The 2008 deadline for submission is August 18, 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

This competition addresses the ubiquitous and sustainable city life of the future. Seoul is changing and developing quite rapidly and the citizens of Seoul are realizing the advantages of this change through constructing new subway lines, repairing road systems, implementing a new bus line system, designing new contemporary buildings, and creating more green parks around the city. Korea’s capital is making a tremendous effort to change its landscape from one that’s plain and practical to one that is environmentally -friendly and is a convenient place to live. The objectives of the competition include: identifying new design opportunities for the sustainable city life, addressing the design discourse and exploration for the living design, that breathes with nature’s five elements: air, water, light, wind, and earth, and seeking creative design solutions to be applied to future city design projects. Categories include: urban environment, visual communication, industrial design, and other designs. Contact EunSook Kwon, Director General, Seoul Design Olympiad 2008, “designseoul AT seoul.go.kr”.

Deadline: 31 July 2008.

Via: Metropolis

The street designs of the past are not adequate to meet 21st-century challenges. Therefore, Transportation Alternatives is looking for new conceptual and physical approaches to the planning of public streets by asking participants to redesign the intersection of 9th Street and 4th Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. The street will be re-imagined as a healthy, safe, and sustainable 21st-century street. The competition will conclude with an exhibit in a public place in December 2008. A publication will also be produced to highlight entries with significant merit that may not have been included in the exhibition and all submissions will be available for public review on this web site once awards have been announced.

The competition is open to the entire public: they hope that community members without any design training as well as design professionals and students will submit their ideas for street design improvements at this intersection. The registration deadline is July 18 (this week!), and all entries are due on August 18 by 5 PM. Visit the site to learn more.

This year, Rafael Viñoly Architects announces several program developments. The firm will award up to five grants of US$60,000 each for independent research projects focused on transformations in the built environment within dynamically changing societies. The deadline for proposals is August 1, 2008. In September, the firm will introduce a new curriculum for its training program. While the program will be offered primarily to current employees of the firm, a limited number of places will be reserved for other selected applicants. The deadline for application is July 15, 2008 (this is the date on the calendar - you have one more day!). Visit the site to learn more.

Opening in the historic center of Florence, a new international school of design will welcome students from all over the world to commence its first full session on January 19, 2009. The Florence Institute of Design International will offer a new type of boutique academics focused entirely on international students providing Interior Design, Graphic Design and Architecture programs with both master and semester abroad options available, as announced by Founder and Creative Director, Architect Marc DiDomenico.

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The Doc Competition was established in 1988 as a means to recognize outstanding achievement in contract design. The Doc Competition has become one of the architecture and design community’s premier benchmarks of success, attained by only the top professionals. Conducted annually by an independent jury, the competition honors superior achievement in contract projects that orchestrate color, space, form, function and materials with consummate finesse. In addition to honoring project design, the competition also honors carpet mills for outstanding achievement in product design. Carpet products are judged based on originality of design, overall aesthetic, pricing and usability in the contract environment.

Deadline for this year’s competition is 15 August 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

Everyville is a new exurban community that has emerged around the intersection of Avenue Z and X Street, just to the Southwest of the intersection of Highway 1 and the Beltway around Megalopolis, about 20 kilometers from the city’s core. Making good use of the flat, featureless terrain that used to support dairy farming, developers have carved the plains here into several subdivisions that by now house over 20,000 inhabitants. Analysts expect that the whole 25-square kilometer area that used to be the historic Big A and Small B farms can eventually support as many as 50,000 inhabitants and perhaps even more.

Recently, Everyville set out a Request for Proposals in which architects are asked to suggest how they might create an image, a coherence, a character and a civic sense for this small town, appropriate to its location and to its history, its site and its future. The proposal can be idiosyncratic. It may even be utopian. It should certainly be an evocation of a real place of community where there is right now none and that may be again just a series of fragments in sprawl a decade from, it should be an Everyville of the imagination and of memory, of hope and of fear.

The proposal must take the form of a series of drawings that will allow citizens to see what Everyville will look like in ten years, and how that community will make sense through the medium of architecture. The deadline for the submission is July 15, 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

At left: 2007 Oasis Award Winner, John van Allen.

Demand for outdoor kitchens is exploding. According to a December survey by the American Society of Landscape Architects, outdoor kitchens are among the most popular spaces being designed for residential clients. “Homeowners are requesting landscape architects design complete outdoor rooms, such as kitchens and bars, for entertaining.“

Submit a conceptual design for an exterior residential room appointed with pieces from Kalamazoo’s Custom Outdoor Kitchen Collection. Winning designs will be presented online and in the October ALSA Award issue of Garden Design.

Entries are due 1 August 2008. Visit the site to learn more.

Diesel Wall is an international art contest that aims to bring intriguing/inspiring/insightful/inciting contemporary ideas to giant urban canvases in city centers around the world. Diesel Wall was born out of a need to salvage what precious public space is left. They will take your art, your powers of dissuasion; your ability to disrupt; incite; excite; inspire and intrigue; to make comment; to make beautiful; to make real; to make people think again. And they will give you walls in four major cities around the world to express yourself!

You must be logged in as a DIESEL CULT user to upload file. Deadline is 11 July 2008. Visit the site to learn more.