December 22, 2010 – Update 1
To all participants,
We have received a significant number of requests from Professors, asking The Arizona Challenge to extend the Application Deadline, from January 7th to January 16th.
The reason for the request is that students start the new semester on January 12th / 14th. By extending the deadline to January 16th, Professors will have additional time to inform and invite their students to participate on this exciting challenge and have them submit their applications by January 16th.
Teams submitting applications by January 16th, and qualify for this competition, will received notification of acceptance the morning of January 18th.
By the end of the day on January 18th, Competition material will be released on the website and email to all accepted teams.
All other deadlines will not change.
Thank you very much,
The Arizona Challenge.
December 23, 2010 – Update 2
Competition Brief
The Site: A hypothetical four square miles, representing the desert southwest desert character found between Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona
Exploration: To facilitate its creative focus, the program will allow for suspending certain codes and marketplace constraints, in order to design for what 21st century miniaturizing and decentralizing technologies now make possible to consider.
Behavior: The objective is to illustrate community relationships that have a positive influence on human behavior, as expressed in Winston Churchill’s observation that, “First we shape our environments, then they shape us.”
Sustainability: Integrating the best and most workable examples, resulting from the now global, trial and error of others, combining technology, behavior and physical relationships.
Culture: This is again about integration using the orchestra and a metaphor. The task is to develop and portray design ideas that have the power to set the stage for high performance communities that aspire to become large scale works of 21st century art.
Summary Question: The Arizona Challenge is all about envisioning communities that are more suited to the 21st century than to simply imitate urban forms that resulted from the Industrial Revolution (London, Chicago, New York) or the post suburban forms of development. If what we call the planning, behavioral and ecological disciplines could be artfully integrated, how might that inspire physical provisions and relationships of community that are more caring, beautiful and sustaining for all ages and stages of life?