The winners of the second Non Architecture competition (www.nonarchitecture.eu) “Making – Alternative design for factories” have been unveiled, showing some absolutely innovative concepts for factories designs.
This was the second of a series of nine competitions, oriented at pushing architects and designers to rethink traditional architectural typologies. In this case factories - intended as building or a group of buildings where goods are manufactured - have been reinterpreted by participants from all around the world. The challenge was to develop an unconventional design for a building to make, with absolute freedom of location, scale and program dimensioning.
The Jury, composed of Alex Hogrefe (founder of Visualazing Architecture and partner at Design Distill); Aldo Sollazzo (founding partner at noumena and researcher at Iaac, Barcelona and Laurent Rosset (creator of Lorystripes and architect at Cebra) selected 3 winners and 12 honourable mentions from more than 100 subscribers.
The winning projects showed a variety of approaches, from extremely visionaries solutions, to more practical and business oriented strategies, going from a flying factory to machine that count the passing of time, from mobile factories that work with a simple click on an app to critique industrial presences.
Winner: “Amazonia Pier” / Julien Nolin - Amazonia Pier is a phantasmagorical critique of the industrial presence of Free Trade Zones, the result of globalization, where large foreign industries take advantage of cheap taxes and even cheaper labor costs to produce their goods, by placing their factories in less wealthy countries and cities.
Winner: “The Cradles” / Aldrich Choy, Allan Chong, Chad Seah, Frances Lai - An annual event where you will also be able to catch these unmanned drone factories in action, extracting minerals and materials before manufacturing at the locations listed below.
Winner: “The Flying Factory” / Zheng Cui, Siyang Yu - The factory is lifted by drones, big and small, powered by solar system, with great mobility and zero land coverage. Products are assembled by working robots and delivered by smart drones, through online orders.
Honorable mention: “Machinapolis” / Niko (Seong) Hur - The project pictures a world where products are no long mass produced. Rather, it celebrates the emergence of small and rapid prototyping that augments innovation and creativity.
Honorable mention: “Cowhouse” / Tamara Jamil, Angela Carbone - Cowhouse was borne from the idea that architecture can act as a site for physical production and as a vehicle to manufacture change. Following lines of production and reinserted into city landscape, patrons are invited to examine the life of cattle.
Honorable mention: “Factory of the absurd” / Thaylini Cristine Luz Belino Bonfin, Miguel João Dias da Costa Pereira, Rafaela Sampaio Agapito Fernandes - The factory of the absurd is a machine that measure the passing of a time. The power source is produced by a human operator, and so, he is the one in the wheel dictating the productivity. If the man is tired, time slows down, if the man is in a hurry, so is the time.
Honorable mention: “The Mobile Factory” / Mark Andrew Lee - Gone are the days of working tirelessly. Now if you wish to be a factory worker you simply sign up for it on the Mobile Factory App and it will brief you on the safety procedures and instructions.
Honorable mention: “Drift” /Chi-Kuan Im, On-U Leong - Every module of DRIFT consists of two parts – Production and Delivery sections. Robot arms on each side of Production section provide corresponding services for procedures.
Honorable mention: “A Factory Toward Fulfilment” / Naomi Rubbra, Leopold Taylor, Felix Yates - A world in which consumerism becomes redundant. Where the factory doesn’t contribute to the problem, but becomes the solution. A Factory Toward Fulfilment takes stock from those brave enough to break away from the conventions of the status quo.
Honorable mention: “Urban Factory” / Sasa Ciabatti, Bilyana Asenova - The future factory transforms from a receiver of instructions to an open environment for cooperation between suppliers and customers. Suppliers and customers find themselves in a close collaboration at an early stage in the development of a new product.
Honorable mention: “PONOS” / Frixos Petrou, Sofia Nikolaidou, Emeline Dussaucy, Matteo Novarino - PonosTM promotes itself as #thefutureofwork – an obscure facility for providing any and all kinds of services, from logistics to automobile prototyping.
Honorable mention: “An Anarchistic Factory” / Rik Lambers - An Anarchistic Factory is an alternative for plain social housing which formalizes the low-skilled, in-formal, in-efficient jobs that squatters are doing now; recycling waste. It proposes to bypass a river and build a simple structure that takes in polluted riverwater .
Honorable mention: “RandomAccessMemory” / Cristina Cărcănescu, John Chia - Random Access Memory has a mnemonic agenda, aiming to marry traditional crafting with digital manufacturing. The idea of crafting techniques becoming extinct leads to over-romanticised solutions of prevention.
Honorable mention: “Walk for Progress” / Wong Suen Yi, Chou Chia Yi - We propose a mobile device, “Waking-Print”, as our flyer factory.The low-tech working device is designed to be too heavy to be pushed by one person, therefore it needs a lot of people at the same time to operate it.
Honorable mention: “Of Dead and Bread” / Rachid Jalloul - This crematorium bakery is set in a natural space. It is a public open space that allows reflection and rejuvenation.
