COMPETITION 2/4. "Geopolitical Borders"

31/03/2011. by THINK SPACE. Deadline, 04/26/2011 [ZAG]
metalocus, PEDRO NAVARRO

The Zagreb Society of Architects is launching the second of four architectural competitions for this year’s Think Space cycle. For this year’s annual cycle, the main theme connecting all four competitions is Borders.

In order to establish the inquiry of space as projection, but also as denunciation and identification of local conditions within a global context, Mrs Eva Franch i Gilabert - programme's Guest Curator and Director of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York - proposes to go back to the conceptual space for the establishment of difference: the Border.

Devised by Teddy Cruz, Gvatemalan born architect and director of San Diego-based practice estudio teddy cruz, whose work emerges out of research-framework conceptualized in The Political Equator, the second competition challenges architects and designers to re-think - The New Global Border - by exposing conflict of border regions as operational tool to re-imagine new models of possible coexistences.

''This competition calls for critical observations of border regions as laboratories from which to imagine new paradigms of urbanization and democratization. These critical thresholds amplify the politics of migration and citizenship, labor and surveillance, the tensions between sprawl and density, formal and informal urbanisms, wealth and poverty and the collisions between natural systems and political jurisdiction, exposing conflict as operational tool to re-think artistic practices.''

Teddy Cruz

Submission deadline is on April 26th, 2011(Tue), 23:59, Central European Time.
Results will be published on the official Think Space website on May 10th, 2011(Tue).
Entrance fee of 30 EUR is required till April 12th, 2011.
From April 13th till April 26th entrance fee will be 45 EUR.

More information

Teddy Cruz

Teddy Cruz is a Guatemalan-born architect, whose work dwells at the border between San Diego, California and Tijuana, Mexico. He has been developing a practice and pedagogy that emerges out of the particularities of this bicultural territory. He is recognized internationally in collaboration with community-based nonprofit organizations such as Casa Familiar for its work on housing and its relationship to an urban policy more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city.

Teddy Cruz obtained a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University and the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. In 2004–2005 he was the first recipient of the James Stirling Memorial Lecture on the City Prize, by the Canadian Center of Architecture and the London School of Economics, and is currently an associate professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD in San Diego. He has designed new mixed-use developments that reuse and adapt existing structures and recycled materials.