Superscape 2024: a prize for architectural concepts

Population growth, increasing urbanisation and social change pose new challenges for architecture and urban planning. Reflecting these processes of change, Superscape opens a creative space for unconventional ideas meant to deliver new impulses to real-life architectural output and urban development. The biennial prize seeks to encourage innovative and visionary architectural concepts with an interdisciplinary approach that explore new models of living and strategies for inhabiting an urban context in the future. 

Topic 2024: Form Follows Environment – Regenerative Architecture

In light of the condition of our planet and of the gigantic demographic changes that will take place in the decades to come, architecture and construction industry are confronted with enormous challenges and issues that have to be addressed urgently and dealt with as fast as possible.

Sustainability will not be sufficient in the future. Growth pressure and simultaneous depletion of resources demand a completely new way of and change in thinking. Regenerative principles have to become an integral part of architecture and urban planning. Form follows environment: Architecture, understood as extension of the location, the terrain, the flora and fauna and the ecosystem, creates concepts that will turn around ecological damages and have a positive impact on the natural surroundings. The goal is to become climate-positive instead of climate-neutral.

In practice, this also means that construction has to be circular construction with sustainable materials and techniques and that the protagonists of the construction as well as of the real estate industry are required to choose innovative paths: Renovation instead of demolition; maintenance, transformation and flexible use of already existing buildings; material recycling, upcycling of building structures, retrofitting and urban mining – all of this and much more will contribute to optimising the use of stock and resources. The re-use-principle also helps revaluating and preserving technical skills and creates local jobs.
 

https://www.superscape.at/en/