Q & A |
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REGISTRATION The competition is open to practitioners with a minimum of five years of professional experience, excluding internships and student work, in the field of architecture following receipt of their first professional degree. Can registrants be from outside North America? Yes. Can a firm register more than once and enter more than one proposal? Yes, provided that the office fields different teams and that there are no overlapping of team members or creative work. The goals is to have truly independently solutions. How will I receive the complete project brief? After successful registration, you will be taken to a thank you page with a link to the complete project brief as well as receive a confirmation email with a link to the complete project brief. If you have not received your confirmaion email within thirty minutes after your registration is complete, please check your spam/junk email filters for email from noreply@flipastrip.org.
INVITATION The Museum is still in the process of selecting the invited teams, who are being chosen based on the strength of their past performance. Some will have established portfolios of build work, but most will be younger offices who have a demonstrated interest in competitions of this nature. To protect the entrants, the Museum will not provide the names of any competitors until the work has been submitted and juried. This is true for both invited teams and open-call submissions.
ANONYMITY No. This is a blind jury, which means the identity of all of the submissions will be withheld from the jury until the winners have been selected. Teams that identify the authorship of their submission on their boards will be disqualified prior to jurying. SUBMISSION The board can be up to .25" and the projections can be up to .25² beyond the face of the board. Can the site plan be larger than 1" = 30'-0"? Is that 1" = 30'-0" a minimum or must it be exactly 1"= 30'-0"? It must be exactly 1"= 30'-0". We'd like all of the site plans to be at the same scale so that we can directly compare different submissions. Can we hand deliver our submission the day the projects are due? Yes, Section 5.6 of the Competition Brief states "Deliveries may be made in person to the same address." Entrants dropping their submissions off in person must do so during the museum's normal business hours. All projects must be received prior to deadline stated in Section 5.6. Is there any compensation that can be made for international entries? Entrants submitting from outside the United States may submit two 30"x40" drawings rolled up and shipped in a tube, instead of having them mounted on boards. The cost of shipping boards can be cost prohibitive from some international locations.
INITIAL TECHNICAL REVIEW The general viability of each proposal will be assessed during the Technical Jury. As indicated online, an informed panel knowledgeable about this sort of development from a number of different angles will assess the cost and feasibility of the proposed designs. Projects will receive one of three rankings (highly feasible, feasible or unfeasible) before advancing to the Design Jury. The Technical Jury includes a range of local development and design experts and project supporters: names will be posted on the website when the list is complete. The Technical Jury's input is advisory in nature.
IDEAS COMPETITION Although there are some discrepancies, entrants are instructed to use the information in the drawings as the base condition and develop their designs from them. Can the architects contact the owners of the properties to ask questions? Entrants should not contact the property owners. If all of the entrants were to do this, they would be overrun with calls and emails. These three sites are being offered by the municipalities as typical examples of a ubiquitous, local and national condition. The owners are not sponsors of the competition. While we understand that if this were a design/build competition, you would expect to tailor your project to a specific owner or his/her vision, in this case to do so misses the point of this idea-generating competition. The jury will be assessing the viability of the submissions with an eye toward the larger themes and applicability of your proposal. SCOPE Yes, we want competitors to look at these structures and think about what they could become versus simply tearing them down and starting over. Competitors should work with these found conditions -- moving, extending, and relocating the walls and roofs; growing the buildings up and out or possibly shrinking them down. What percentage of the existing structure can be moved or removed? The competition brief says we can't tear the structure down, but how much can we modify it? The competition sponsors are interested in reuse scenarios. There are plenty of examples of strip shopping centers that have been demolished and replaced by newer facilities-that is not what this competition is about. There is no magic formula for how much of these strip centers can be modified or altered. Enough of the existing center¹s DNA should be resident in your proposed vision that the jury can assess the benefit of your proposed design. Can we assume it is possible to apply for some reasonable zoning exemptions, such as a change in the way parking is dealt with or modifying building height requirements? Yes. Please make sure to note any proposed zoning changes in the text that appears on your board so that the jurors have a complete understanding of what is required to realize your scheme. DRAWINGS AND RESOURCES Only the front elevation of the existing restaurant has been provided. The organizers did not have sufficient information to draft the other three elevations. There is a sign at the entrance to Strip Mall on the Scottsdale site, can we add it to our submission? The sign was omitted. You may draw it in if you like. Are there CAD files of the base drawings? If so can we receive them via e-mail? We do not have CAD files. ZONING, CONSTRUCTION AND COST ISSUES For Phoenix the site is:
http://copwww.ci.phoenix.az.us/PLANNING/zondistr.html What is the estimated cost per square foot for local construction? Basic commercial construction for a strip mall (minus the costs of land, fees and financing): $80-100/sq ft Is there currently any debt on the property, and if so, how high is the leverage? Assume there is no debt. Along the same lines, are we to assume that we are purchasing the subject property as a developer, or are we to work with the existing property owner? Assume you are the architect or designer working with an existing property owner. We're assuming that the current financing arrangements (if any) and leases do not contain language which would restrict the timing and extent of our architectural interventions. Is this correct? That is correct. The competition is identified as an ideas competition; are there any financial (budgetary) limitations that need to be taken into consideration for the proposals? Yes. The competition seeks viable ideas. As part of the submission, each team is required to submit a two-page statement explaining their design premise and the economics behind it. The technical jury will assess the viability of the proposed design based on their knowledge of the market and the other forces that come to bear on issues of this nature. Are there any documents available that identify the existing as-built conditions such as construction type, structural systems, etc.? No, unfortunately. Entrants should assume that the structures have been built using standard steel frame construction systems with non-loadbearing exterior and party wall systems. Can we propose a phased redevelopment of our Strip Mall? Competitors may propose a phased approach. If your solution is phased, each stage should be clearly documented on the competition submission. What is the budget for this specific project if any? No specific budget has been given. Each competitor is tasked with proposing what they consider a reasonable and prudent budget. This should be based on some projected or anticipated financial return that will keep the strip mall viable. In one of the previously answered questions, you said that the team is to take on the role of architect; but how can we present a case of financial feasibility unless we also take on the role of developer? Also, can you clarify what the criteria are for judging the financial feasibility? One of the things that architects typically do is prepare cost estimates (or have them prepared) for their clients. For the purposes of this Ideas Competition we are asking teams to provide general cost information about their proposed design. The members of the technical jury will review that figure and decide whether they agree with the number being proposed and then weigh the costs of the improvements against the projected rental income they imagine the improved property will yield. Because this is an Ideas Competition, they will just be assessing ballpark figures. The jurors are experienced professionals in this arena and will be able to fairly judge ideas that seem accomplishable versus those that are not. The technical jury will share their assessment with the design jury who will have the ultimate responsibility of selecting the winner, based on the criteria stated in the competition brief. The competition overview communicates the desire for a high amount of technical rigor regarding the economic feasibility of the proposals. Without having much more specific information about existing condition of the buildings how are we to know if what we are proposing is, in fact, "generally viable"? Entrants should give the technical analysis their best effort with the information they have been given. Entrants will not be held accountable for information about the base conditions that has not been provided by the competition sponsors. As stated the goal is to determine whether or not each proposal is "generally viable." Some degree of speculation will probably be required and in those cases, entrants should clearly state the assumptions on which their proposal is based. Although this is an ideas competition, the sponsors hope to ultimately inspire actual change. To do that, proposals will need to be rooted in reality and financially achievable. PRIZES The jury will identify a set of overall winners, not winners for each site. Additional questions should be submitted to: questions@joneskroloff.com |
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