2019 Timber Competition

An online registration form must be completed for an entire team or for each individual participant. There is no registration fee to participate in the challenge. Each registered participant will receive a confirmation email that will include information for final online submission. Please add the email address competitions@acsa-arch.org to your address book to ensure that you receive all emails regarding your submission. The competition is open for currently enrolled students and require a faculty sponsor from an ACSA member school to enroll students by completing an online registration form (available at www.acsa-arch.org) by April 3, 2019. Faculty sponsors must complete a form for the entire studio or for each individual student or team of students participating. Each student will receive a confirmation email that will include personal login information for final online submission. Students or teams wishing to enter the challenge on their own must have a faculty sponsor, who should complete the form.

During registration the faculty will have the ability to add students, add teams, assign students to teams, and add additional faculty. Registration is required by April 3, 2019, after which edits and additions can be made until a student starts a final submission, then the registration is not editable. Faculty may assign a “Faculty Representative” to a registered student, who will have access to change, edit, and make additions to the registration.

The administration of the competition at each institution is left to the discretion of the faculty within the guidelines set forth in this document. Research and design work on the competition should be structured over the course one or more semesters of the 2018-2019 academic year.

The intent of this competition is to provide an academically rigorous design challenge suitable for integration into the curriculum of an architectural design studio or course. Curriculum integration is not a requirement of competition guidelines, but is strongly encouraged. The administration of the competition at each institution is left to the discretion of the faculty within the guidelines set forth in this document.

Each faculty sponsor is expected to develop a system to evaluate the students’ work using the criteria set forth in this program. The evaluation process should be an integral part of the design process, encouraging students to scrutinize their work in a manner similar to that of the jury. The final result of the design process will be a submission of up to four presentation boards describing the design solution. In addressing the specific issues of the design challenge, submissions must clearly demonstrate the design solution’s response to the following requirements:

• An elegant, expressive understanding of timber
• A strength of the argument and the proposal’s ability to support the concept for the design
• An articulate mastery of formal concepts and aesthetic values
• A mature awareness and innovative approach to environmental issues, including energy consumption
• A thorough appreciation of human needs and social responsibilities
• A capability to integrate functional aspects of the problem in an architectural manner
• A capacity to derive a design, using wood, with the maximum innovation and possibility
• A clearly defined approach to materials, with a premium placed on design using healthy and affordable materials

Each presentation must directly address the criteria outlined in the Design Challenge and Criteria for Judging and must include (but are not limited to) the following required drawings. All drawings should be presented at a scale appropriate to the design solution and include a graphic scale and north arrow.

• Site Plan showing the surrounding buildings, topography, and circulation patterns, and indicating phased use of site over time
• Detailed renderings of the building, clearly showing the timber structural system
• Floor plans
• Vertical section of the whole building/site sufficient to show site context and major program elements
• Large scale drawing(s), either orthographic or three dimensional, illustrating the innovative use of timber and associated components, at 1”- 1’-0”
• Three-dimensional representation(s), either in the form of an axonometrics, perspectives, and/or model photographs – one of which should illustrate the overall character of the project. At least one of these views must be of a significant interior space, and one view must be of the building shown within the neighborhood context
• Material image selection board that demonstrates the primary exterior and interior materials of the project, with clear declarations of the content of all primary materials to show what each is made from and how it contributes to human health
• Three-dimensional phasing diagram clearly indicating a (minimum) two phase build-out of the site, including an initial phase encompassing the competition current program, and a second phase maximizing the available site FAR. Diagrams should include dimensions and calculations for both phases

A brief essay, 300 words maximum, in English, describing the most important concepts of the design project is required as part of the submission. Keep in mind that the presentation should graphically convey the design solution and context as much as possible, and not rely on the design essay to convey a basic understanding of the project. The names of student participants, their schools or faculty sponsors must NOT appear in the design essay. This abstract is included in the final online submission, completed by the student(s) in a simple copy/paste text box.

Submissions must be designed on no more than four 20” x 30” (portrait format) digital boards. The names of student participants, their schools, or faculty sponsors must NOT appear on the boards.

All boards are required to be uploaded through the ACSA website in Portable Document Format (PDF) or image (JPEG) files. Participants should keep in mind that, due to the large number of entries, preliminary review does not allow for the hanging end-to-end display of presentation boards. Accordingly, participants should not use text or graphics that cross over from board to board.