After careful examination, the jury of Well Building 2050 – 2016 edition awarded 20,000$ to Dreamcraft, coming from Germany.

The 2 other winners, respectively second and third are Dynamic Balance (United-States) and UMM Monterrey (Mexico). Each team brought home a 5,000$ reward. The Terra Ethica association also awarded the jury’ special prize to the Melteam Pot team (France).

 

Award ceremony and the final ranking

The award ceremony took place in Strasbourg on November 23th, during the international colloquium Build & Connect, organized by the Well Building 2050 sponsor, the Fibres-Energivie cluster.

Along with the competition’ sponsors – France Air, Terra Ethica and Fibres-Energivie -, Thierry Bièvre, Elithis President – awarded the 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd and and special prizes to the finalist teams.

 

 

- 1st prize : the DreamCraft team and its « What wood happen » project. The team comprises 9 students (1 french, 8 germans) from the Technische Universität Dresden et deTechnische Universität Chemnit.

Prize : 20,000$

Jury’s comment : « Our house is burning and we look away ». The Dreamcraft team echoes the declaration on sustainable development made during the 2002 Earth Summit, by providing us with a foresight utopia aiming at reducing Man’s footprint on the environment. We have been genuinely moved by the team’s global philosophy, which is building the city with resources that are not borrowed from the future generations. By forecasting the natural resources’ capacity to build and feed mankind, this project supports growth and progress and enables well-being by encouraging well-living.

 

 

 

- 2^nd prize: the Dynamic Balance team and its « City on the Water » project. The team is composed of 5 students (4 indians and 1 chinese) from the Pratt Institute,  the Syracuse University,  the University of Pennsylvania and the Emory University.

Prize: 5,000$

Jury’s comment: “How are we going to feed and accommodate an extra 3 milliard of people on the earth?” Through its project, the Dynamic Balance team manages to imagine a floating eco-district mixing “low tech” with “high tech” that will take advantage of available spaces and resources, while favouring mobility and offering a new way to write urbanity by making density and intensity coexist.

 

 

 

- 3rd prize: the UMM Monterrey team and its « Cactaceae - An Oasis for Life » project. The team is made up of 7 Mexican students from the Universidad Metropolitana de Monterrey.

Prize: 5,000$

Jury’s comment:  Man and nature constitute a consistent whole: only in nature can the most harmonious adjustments between living species and their environment be gazed at. Even with the most extreme aridity, life knows how to cohabitate in a hostile ecosystem. The UMM Monterrey provided us with a housing inspired by biomimicry while relying on new technologies to take advantage of both biotope and biocenosis. It is a form of environmental altruism.

 

 

- Jury special prize: the Melteam Pot team and its « Slow Building, an ecosystem » project, consisting in 9 French students from Sciences Po Paris, HEC Paris, l’Institut national des sciences appliquées de Strasbourg and l’École supérieure des arts décoratifs d'Amiens.

Terra Ethica prize: 2,500$

Jury’s comment:  Man - the citizen- needs to change and he is the only one holding the key to improvement. This project shows that it is possible to break representation codes, to build the city on the city while respecting it, and that, in relying on social link, to design an incentivizing housing bringing its users closer to participation, sharing and  mutual cooperation. The “slow” philosophy detailed by this team conveys social progress just beneath the surface.

 

 

 

“Through their work, those students highlighted the users’ real expectations and placed Man at the heart of the design of the sustainable city.  Their dreams must be the foundations of their thinking and determine their future actions. Believe in the reality of your imagination, it is the only way to make the impossible possible,” concluded Thierry Bièvre during the contest’s award ceremony.

 

 

From left to right: Olivier DOLBEAU (CEO of the France Air Group), Emmanuelle DANCOURT (Journalist), Pierre-Etienne BINDSCHEDLER (President of the Fibres-Energivie cluster), the DreamCraft team, Thierry BIEVRE (Elithis President) and David LACROIX (Elithis sponsor of the German team).

 

From left to right: Pierre-Etienne BINDSCHEDLER, Olivier DOLBEAU, Shaguni GUPTA and Vardhan MEHTA (representatives of the Dynamic Balance team), Emmanuelle DANCOURT.

 

From left to right: Thierry BIEVRE, Olivier DOLBEAU, UMM Monterrey team, Emmanuelle DANCOURT, Alan KIRSCH (Jury member) and Romain MAIRE (Elithis sponsor of the Mexican team).

 

From left to right: Thierry BIEVRE, Clément TRIBUT (Elithis sponsor of the French team), representatives of the Melteam Pot team.

 

The four finalist teams, the Well Building 2050 sponsors, the Elithis sponsors, Thierry BIEVRE and Emmanuelle DANCOURT.