Jury Chairman ：Jürgen Weidinger



The competition topic in 2016 is vernacular symbioses. What are the backgrounds and aims of vernacular symbiosis? Future societies will depend on a balanced relation between land and cities.Our future cities need the land to survive.That is the reason for a contemporary global rural revival movement, which is of significant importance in China.To be succesful in this movement we need to obtain more knowledge about ecological as well as meaningful design of the land and we need to develop new design skills.For that reason the competition intends to investigate the potential of vernacular symbioses.

Vernacular symbioses means a design, which is based on local conditions, such as landform, climate, material availability and the particular knowledge of localpeople. This means looking closely to given conditions of a site or landscape and also to the design principles of site-specificness of previous generations. The challenge is to find appropriate designs to integrate human life in local conditions.

Dongjingyu village is a case to explore this objectives.The competition seeks for proposals to highlight vernacular symbiosis in an emotional and aesthetic way.The site of the former village will become an experimental exibition space, where different kinds of approaches to vernacular symbioses can be experienced to become a stimulus for urban and landscape architecture design.We are waiting for design proposals coming from the fields of landscape architecture, art and architecture, whether it is place making, land art, art installations or other new types of interventions.

Another competition goal is to (potentially) implement one or more winning entries. So the participants should consider feasibility aspects. The design intervention are supposed to be aware of the process that nature is taking over the site of the village more an more and that there can be only extensive maintenance of the interventions.The organisors of the competition intend to continue the exibition in the future to build up a laboratory and archive for vernacular symbiosis, which can be experienced by professionals and visitors as examples for the coming rural revival movement in China.