Winners of the Fort Tilden Field House Competition Announced

Winners have been announced of the suckerPUNCH-organized competition for the Fort Tilden Field House and its surrounding sports fields and courts in Queens, NY.

This international ideas competition seeks to investigate architectural problems such as form, engagement with landscape, materiality, structure and aperture while also investigating ambitions of architectural atmosphere, styling, effects, and mood. The field house and its environs function primarily as event space whether for sport or leisure and the ambition for its styling, atmosphere and intended effects were asked to be curated in coordination with the architecture.

The award jury comprised Abigail Coover (hume coover studio, suckerPUNCH); Nathan Hume (hume coover studio, suckerPUNCH); Jose Gonzalez (SOFTlab); Mike Szivos (SOFTlab); Richard Garber (GRO architects); David Nam (Gehry Partners); and Ted Ngai (atelier nGai, CASE).

These are the winning proposals:

1st Place: “play the loop”
Tetsuya Kawano + Karolina Fidor, Paris France

“The project site touching the seashore, the juxtaposed natural area of beach, dunes and maritime forest, the Marine Rockaway Bridge, nearby habitation areas… The analysis of the project area cutting transversely the peninsula into two brought us to draw few sharp lines to bind together the site and the context in a coherent entity.” - more info

2nd Place: “fort tilden / solar field house”
zellnerplus, Culver City, California

“We see the site as neither a classically green civic space in tradition of Central Park nor a truly wild or natural preserve such as the eight refuges within the Long Island National Wildlife Refuge Complex.* Fort Tilden is not imbued with a remarkable institutional mission (to preserve, to educate or to even stimulate the public) and it is arguably not a natural space infused with a particularly rich natural legacy worthy of significant preservation efforts.” - more info

3rd Place: “fort tilden fields”
Frisly Colop Morales, Vienna, Austria

“The concept proposal for the Fort Tilden Fields is comprised of an observation deck, restaurant, recreational spaces, lobbies, and unique spaces existing in the intersection of the project’s shapes and edges, which are between land and water. It becomes a recreational landmark that will satisfy New Yorkers who are seeking a sanctuary of harmonious combinations of genuine aesthetics and practicality. The site is inspired by natural formations, distinctively existing as an open park where sport fields are not arranged in a traditional manner and instead follow the dynamic movement of the volumes which invoke an impression of natural waves.” - more info

Honorable Mention: “dunescape”
Iveanette Santiago Rivera + Daniel Affleck, San Francisco, California

“The recreation center is conceived as a cellular configuration of “dunes” oriented around a public space. By imagining a dune which wraps around to form a cell, we were able to create spaces appropriate for the viewing of sports events. Like the nearby forts, the modules are embedded within the coastal surrounding to provide protection from the elements.” - more info

Honorable Mention: “fort tilden field house”
Michael Tyre, Brooklyn, New York

“The Field House project seeks the in-between condition, an intentionally ambiguous state aimed at expanding conventional modes of use. Here the architecture operates in-between the scale of a building and a landscape, spaces fluctuate in-between interior and exterior atmospheres, and the landscape materializes in-between the natural and the synthetic.” - more info