As recently revealed by the 3rd Vertical Cities Asia, the delegation from Tongji University carried away the first prize for the creative design with “Close City” as the theme. ETH Zurich won the second prize while the National University of Singapore won the third prize.
As learned, Tongji University has been invited to this international competition for three years and is the only university that has been winning prizes consecutively. At the 3rd event held this year, Tongji University has won the top prize for architecture universities in Asia.
The Vertical Cities Asia was launched jointly in January 2011 by the National University of Singapore and the World Future Foundation with the purpose to seek innovative design solutions for modern cities that are facing problems including massive population growth and life quality deterioration. The competition is held once every year for a five-year term.
The 3rd event this year attracted participation of 20 delegations from top ten universities in Asia, Europe and America, including Tsinghua University, Tongji University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the University of Pennsylvania, etc.
The judge panel was composed of five worldly class experts, including Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Kazuyo Sejima, and Allison Williams.
The 3rd event, with “Everyone Harvests,” focuses on urban agricultural development. Participating delegations were requested to design a set of sustainable vertical city solutions for an area of one square kilometer in the suburbs of Hanoi, Vietnam in 2050. The solutions have to meet the living and other life requirements of a population of 100,000 people.
The design team of Tongji’s “Close City” was set up in the end of 2012 and kicked off at the beginning of 2013. The team went to Vietnam for field research in the end of February, presented drawings for interim review in April, answered inquiries for their graduation thesis in June and went to Singapore in July for the final competition. The entire project took more than seven months.