Description
Natural systems offer architects and designers signficant potential as alternative, ecologically performative architectonic strategies. The d3 Natural Systems competition invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore the potential of analyzing, documenting, and deploying nature-based influences in architecture, urbanism, interiors, and designed objects.

Established in 2009, the annual d3 Natural Systems competition is an emerging voice in alternative architecture and one of the most notable awards in speculative, performance-based design. It recognizes exemplary ideas that redefine architecture as an ecological project through the implementation of advanced programs, technologies, materials, and social interventions that engage adaptability, globalization, and emergence.

The 2013 competition calls for innovative proposals that advance sustainable thought and performance through the study of intrinsic environmental geometries, behaviors, and flows. By identifying, examining, and applying their structural order on form and function- -bottom-up, performance-based solutions for limitless building typologies, functional programs, and material conditions may be realized. An architecture of emergence suggests that design expression requires purpose beyond formal assumption and aesthetic experimentation itself. Concurrent with sustainable thought, the d3 Natural Systems competition assumes that architecture does not simply form, but rather perform various functions beyond those conventionally associated with buildings. Design submissions must be environmentally responsible while advancing inventive conceptual solutions. Although proposals should be technologically feasible, they may suggest fantastical architectural visions of a sustainable global future.

The d3 Natural Systems competition allows designers freedom to approach their creative process in a scale-appropriate manner–from large-scale master planning endeavors, to individual building concepts, to notions of interior detail. Accordingly, there are no restrictions on site, scale, program, or building typology, proposals should carefully address their selected context. Awards totaling $3,000 USD and Special Mentions 1st Prize: $1,250 USD 2nd Prize: $1,000 USD 3rd Prize: $750 USD.