by Playfuls Staff |
11th March 2007
AMD and Cameron Sinclair, winner of last year’s TED Prize
and founder of Architecture for Humanity, announced the first ever Open
Architecture Prize at the annual TED Conference. The $250,000 Open [more] Architecture
Prize is the largest prize in the field of architecture and is designed to be a
multi-year program that will draw competition from design teams around the
world.
Each year, a winning design will be selected from a field of
low-cost, sustainable design projects and built in a selected community. The
first project for the Open Architecture Prize will be an “e-community center,”
a centralized building equipped with internet connectivity solutions designed
to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the
Internet. The winning designs will be built as part of the prize and in
alignment with the 50x15 Initiative, a program founded by AMD to connect 50
percent of the world’s population to the Internet by 2015.
“The Open Architecture Prize delivers on Architecture for
Humanity’s vision of encouraging collaboration and challenging designers to
reach beyond the traditional bounds of architecture to develop innovative
solutions that improve global living conditions,” said Dan Shine, director of
the 50x15 Initiative, AMD. “The creative designs developed in this competition
will contribute to the 50x15 Initiative’s ambitious goal of connecting 50
percent of the world’s population to the Internet by 2015.”
After the winning designs are built, the plans will be made
openly available through the Open Architecture Network, an open source online
gathering place created to fulfill the wish Sinclair was granted through last
year’s TED Prize.
The network was unveiled yesterday at TED 2007 by Sinclair
and a number of project supporters, including AMD, Hot Studio, and Sun
Microsystems, Inc. It brings together architects, designers and community
organizers to freely share blueprints, ideas and resources for improvement
projects in areas affected by geo-political, environmental or economic
hardship. The Open Architecture Network is hosted on Sun’s Sun Fire servers
based on AMD Opteron processors at AMD’s global headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
“For far too long many great award-winning designs have gone
undeveloped,” said Cameron Sinclair, executive director and co-founder,
Architecture for Humanity. “Through the Open Architecture Network we unveiled
yesterday and the Open Architecture Prize we are announcing today, we are not
only challenging the creative world to design innovative structures, we are
going one step further and implementing the winning solution to positively
affect thousands of lives.”
In addition to technology expertise and a diverse portfolio
of innovative connectivity solutions, the 50x15 Initiative brings significant
experience in assessing regional technology problems and deploying relevant
solutions to Architecture for Humanity’s project. This expertise is essential
in developing the competition criteria, as well as determining which design
will empower a community to the greatest extent possible.
