Architecture For Humanity
Diana Bianchini
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Stories from design teams and schools
Videos of student participation
Conversations between architects and students

Starts: January 29, 2009

Registration Ends: May 4, 2009

Entries Due: June 1, 2009

Open To: Design professionals and non-professionals in partnership with primary and secondary school teachers and students.

Entry Fee: $25 USD per entry (Fee waived for entrants from developing nations)

Jury: Leaders in education and architecture (including students) to be hosted online and at the 2009 Aspen Ideas Festival. See full Jury Bios.

School Award: The winning entry will receive up to $50,000 to build or improve classrooms for their school

Design Award: The winning design team will receive a grant of up to $5,000 to help their school build or improve classrooms.

Aspen, Colorado, United States – Wednesday, June 1, 2009 — Worldwide, 776 million people are illiterate. To provide access to a quality education for all children, there is an urgent need to upgrade the crumbling infrastructure of tens of millions of classrooms and build ten million new classrooms. Meeting this challenge would represent the largest building project the world has ever undertaken.

At the 2009 World Economic Forum, Orient Global, Architecture for Humanity and a consortium of partners announced the 2009 Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom (www.openarchitecturechallenge.org), the first large-scale open source initiative to improve the design of classrooms around the world. Serving as a catalyst to build thousands of affordable and sustainable educational facilities, the challenge attracted 1,066 teams from 65 countries. In total, entrants submitted more than 400 designs by the 1st June deadline.

This unique initiative required the architecture, design and engineering community to collaborate with students and teachers to develop a site-specific classroom – real schools, real students and ultimately real solutions. Many teams worked directly with students through an innovative design curriculum. On July 2nd, a jury will gather at the Aspen Ideas Festival to select the top finalists with the overall winner announced in August.

The overall winning team will be awarded $5,000 and its chosen partner school will receive $50,000 to realize the winning design. Additionally, our School Building Partners, Rumi Schools of Excellence, Building Tomorrow and Blazer Industries working with the Modular Building Institute have committed to build three additional designs. The selected finalists and overall winners will be announced at the end of August.

“The response to the 2009 Open Architecture Challenge has been remarkable. It has clearly captured people’s imagination,” said Richard F. Chandler, Chairman of Orient Global. “Education is the first step on the journey to prosperity. We are delighted that the competition has generated such a large portfolio of design solutions. The challenge now is use the best of these designs to improve learning environments around the world.”

“The competition has showed that when students and teachers have a say in how their environment is shaped incredible things can happen,” said Cameron Sinclair, Executive Director and Co-founder, Architecture for Humanity. “By partnering with hundreds of socially driven designers this initiative has created a portfolio of locally appropriate and tangible solutions allowing school building groups, NGOs and governments to scale sustainable and cost effective educational facilities on a global level.”

All designs hosted on Worldchanging (www.Worldchanging.com) are held under a Creative Commons Share-alike Non-Commercial Attribution License allowing others to share these solutions.
Starting in September, a touring exhibition of the best and most enlightening designs will be placed on display. Currently venues in Caracas, Doha, Singapore and Tokyo have been secured for the ‘back to school’ show, and a number of entrants and Architecture for Humanity local chapters will be showcasing the designs in their neighborhoods throughout the fall.

It is hoped that these innovative designs will not only shape the future of our schools but highlight the need for better facilities to teach the next generation of leaders.

For more information, please visit: http://www.openarchitecturechallenge.org

Principal Partner:
Orient Global

Sponsors:
AMD 50x15 Initiative, Bezos Family Foundation, Google SketchUp, Graham Foundation, Irvin Stern Family Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts

Education Partners:
Curriki and Global Nomads Group

School Building Partners:
Orient Global's Rumi Schools of Excellence, Building Tomorrow, Blazer Industries and The Modular Building Institute

Challenge Partners:
Aspen Institute, The Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS), Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEPFI), Do Something, Dwell Magazine, Ethos, Global Green USA, Indian Architect and Builder, United States Green Building Council (USGBC), SMART Technologies

Architecture for Humanity thanks Bacchus Press for the generous support in providing green printing of the exhibition materials for the Aspen Ideas Festival and the traveling exhibition.

About Orient Global

Orient Global is a Singapore-based multi-billion dollar investment group founded by New Zealand-born entrepreneur, Richard F. Chandler. Its purpose is to Build Prosperity for Tomorrow’s World using a holistic approach in its financial and social investments based on twenty years of investment experience in emerging markets. Orient Global believes that effective investment is a “prosperity accelerator”, providing industry and business with the capital to enable the production of goods and services that meet the needs of society, thereby fostering economic growth and employment.

In its social investments, Orient Global seeks to build prosperity through human capital and business enterprise development. Rumi Schools of Excellence is Orient Global’s first chain of low-cost private schools in India. Orient Global’s work with Rumi Schools of Excellence and low-cost private schools in Africa and China is part of its US$ 100 million commitment to education, with a mission to combat global illiteracy by enhancing the quality and availability of education for low-income communities in developing countries. For more information, please visit: www.orientglobal.com

About the Open Architecture Challenge

The Open Architecture Challenge brings public attention to inequities in the built environment affecting the health, prosperity and well being of under-served communities. The challenge is an open international design competition hosted on Worldchanging every two years. All are invited to participate. Funding from partners and sponsors goes towards constructing the winning designs.

The Open Architecture Network and the Open Architecture Challenge are programs of Architecture for Humanity, a 501(c)3 charitable organization that seeks architectural solutions to humanitarian crisis and brings design services to communities in need. For more information, please visit: www.architectureforhumanity.org-->