StreetFest Competition

The Festival of Ideas for a New City is a major new collaborative initiative between scores of downtown organizations, from large universities to arts groups and community organizations, working together to affect change. The Festival is a first for New York and will demonstrate the power of the creative community to imagine the city of the future. The Festival will serve as a platform for artists, architects, designers, and other thought leaders to exchange ideas, propose solutions, create new problems, and invite the public to participate in improving urban life.

The Festival of Ideas for a New City will take place during the weekend of May 7-8, 2011, and will include panels, roundtables, symposia, and workshops; an innovative outdoor "street fair"; and dozens of projects, performances, and events, opening simultaneously at multiple downtown venues. The Bowery will serve as the spine of the Festival, with Cooper Union and the New Museum acting as anchors and hubs for conversation, discussion, learning, and action.

For the occasion of the first Festival of Ideas for a New City in New York City, Storefront for Art and Architecture jointly with the New Museum and New York City's Department of Transportation (NYCDOT) are launching the StreetFest competition for the design, management, and construction of temporary outdoor spaces that produce new ways for collective gathering and city engagement.

On Saturday, May 7, 2011, one winning entry will occupy designated outdoor spaces along the Bowery and the surrounding streets of the New Museum during the Festival. We envision fabricating a minimum of fifteen structures that will cover approximately 2,000 square feet.

These temporary outdoor structures will accommodate a multiplicity of activities including: vendors, workshop areas, outdoor classrooms, demonstrations, installations, music, and other performances and exhibitions.

The Challenge

Prefabricated tenting structures have proliferated in the last years as the only solution to temporary affordable outdoor shelter. The resulting landscape of street fairs or temporary events throughout cities and neighborhoods has been a spatially, geometrically, chromatically, and materially homogeneous environment that simply enables activities to happen without generating a playful engagement with the city or its citizens.

This competition asks for designs that envision street tents not only as shelters but also as active elements within the collective construction and understanding of the city. StreetFest makes a call to Architects, Artists and Engineers to re-envision the performativity-the material, social, and educational possibilities-of temporary outdoor structures.

The winning entry will have these characteristics:

1. Aspires to reinvent the typical street fair tent
2. Is modular; one unit can become three can become seven, providing scalability and the ability to go from an intimate platform to a larger one
3. Is conscientious of the materials used and their impact on the environment
4. Is easy to produce and install; if time allows, there is opportunity to produce additional structures

The selected project will work closely with the StreetFest Task Force committee and will be commissioned to produce, construct, install, and disassemble the final design.

Site Description and Scope

The competition aims to reinvent a site-less typology with a call for projects able to propose new modes of site engagement without a particular site limit.

During the Festival, and facilitated by street closures TBD [see annex 1], the StreetFest will be roughly located around the New Museum and its surrounding streets. The information provided in the map is for orientation only and is subject to change.

However, it is important to consider the dimension of the streets, sidewalks, fire egress lines, trees, street furniture and lighting, etc.

Schedule

Competition Launch December 1, 2010
Registration Deadline January 14, 2010
Site Visit January 15, 2011
Deadline to Submit Questions January 17, 2011
Common Answers Publication on Website January 19, 2011
Registration Confirmation E-mails Sent January 17-19, 2011
Competition Submission Deadline February 6-7, 2011
Winner Announcement Mid-February, 2011
Design-Management-Construction period Mid-February-May1st
StreetFest Date May 7, 2010

Competition Brief (PDF)