Future Living Space Announces Nova Design Award Winners

House For Living Beings. Image © Patricia Yus, Vincent De Borger

NOVA Property Investment have announced the winners of the 2018 Future Living Space competition. Responding to paradigmatic shifts in technology, social networks and the physical environment, the competition called for projects to imagine living spaces in 2025. Through themes of digital connectivity, inter-personal relationships and artificial intelligence, the proposals explored urban development, social spaces and redefined connections to the environment.

As the NOVA prompt asked teams to consider ways of living and how they may be reshaped, the competition focused on ideas of basic needs and living spaces. Projects were judged for innovation, relationship to technology, sustainability, and prototype feasibility. This year’s jury included Qian Wang, Carlo Ratti, Anouk Legendre, Oke Hauser, Maggie Peng, Becky Quintal and Han Zhang. The jury selected 5 finalist teams who were invited to attend NOVA DAY – the culmination of the competition including a design forum and the awards ceremony.

Teams were asked to pitch their entries to the Jury at the ceremony, where the final awards were determined. All finalist teams received a cash award and a NOVA Design Award certificate. Per the competition brief, winning entries may result in a physical prototype by NOVA in 2019. Find out more about this year’s winners below:

First Place: WǒWū

WǒWū. Image © Edgar Rodriguez Lozano, Diego Pulido Torres, Lauren Felix Valencia, Alejandro Marquez Romero , Alberto Vera Zavala

The house of the future is flexible. Not in the terms from which modernism proposed spatial flexibility with the standardized free plan, but instead with a new understanding of the inhabitant, the program, the buildings, and the city. Our proposal arises from the need to accommodate different programs in cities that have already reached their maximum constructive density and where the use of these pre-existing structures must be rethought to create dynamic, diverse, and inclusive cities. Wǒ Wū is an online digital platform that allows its users to program their living space. It is a new way of understanding real estate development and of building and inhabiting our cities.

Design Team: Edgar Rodriguez Lozano, Diego Pulido Torres, Lauren Felix Valencia, Alejandro Marquez Romero, Alberto Vera Zavala

Second Place: House for Living Beings

For hundreds of millions of years, forests have covered much of the Earth’s surface and over the past 8,000 years, nearly half of the Earth’s forests have been destroyed. In a context of increasing urbanization, source shortage and climate change, the question of future housing goes beyond the problem of individuals and concerns the whole planet. Because of these patterns, working with nature is more important than ever- the trees outside our front doors will take an important role for the future cities. Our vision of 2025 housing is about a society reclaiming the trees to be part of their houses. They are dynamic ecosystems that provide critical benefits to people and wildlife. Humans will be no longer the centre of the universe. Instead, nature will be connected to us, being part of our responsibilities and actions. Thanks to technology, the inhabitant will not only be conscious about its house, but also about the fauna and flora around; helping us realize about the relationship between all the natural and non-natural elements, understanding that all our actions affect to our environment.

Design Team: Patricia Yus, Vincent De Borger

Honorable Mentions

Residential Printer: A Flexible Life

In 2025, we hope that people will be able to participate in designing what they want, rather than being relatively passive when living in an apartment, choosing an apartment or buying a product. People will only need to buy 50 m² *6m units of space and a few home 3D printers. More people will be able to afford an apartment. They can buy an architect’s design from the Internet and input into equipment, or they can get their personal customization. In addition to kitchen and bathroom, all other spaces are always variable, including furniture. In the same room, functions can change at any time according to users’ real-time needs to save area, Different from ordinary construction methods, 3D printing can realize more abundant space modeling, such as natural undulating terrain and so on , so that people can get experiential living. And if you rent rooms, you can change the pattern at any time according to the number of tenants. Our pictures show only two possibilities as expected, and there are countless spaces for owners to discover for themselves.

Design Team: Bei Yining, Yi Wenbo

Diagonals 2025

There is a middle ground between typical detached suburban housing developments and large-scale, ultra-high-density residential towers. The DIAGONALS / / 2025. project seeks to find this LIVABLE DENSITY. Tightly-packed residential towers often have only limited access to outdoor areas and shared community space. At the other end of the spectrum, suburban sprawl results in outsized consumption of resources and land use. This project proposes a medium-density tower composed of residences that have both private outdoor space and shared community space that can be unique to each ‘sky block’. The repeated diagonal forms of the façade allow for stepped terraces within each residential quarter, and create a view corridor to a shared outdoor space that can serve as a gathering point for residents. Unique, dynamic neighborhoods can then be formed within the project itself – neighborhoods that are habitable, secure, and easily accessible. Social equity is on display within each sky block.

Design Team: Phillip Stien

House of iFURNITECTURE

The 21st century is the era of connection with the advent of the Internet and smartphones, but as a side effect, we lost the physical interactions between human beings. We are using more time in our private room than before to enjoy the digital world. When we are locked in our own realm, we isolate ourselves from our family and waste time instead of creating memories in our house. We conceived that in a typical room, empty spaces around furniture are larger than we basically need. Therefore, our proposal is an attempt to break the room into small units, each contains one domestic program, such as sleeping, studying, hanging clothes. Units are suspended around family space and keep distance to each other. When owners want to move from unit to unit, they have to enter the family space and reconnect with their family members.

Design Team: Hung Nguyen Dung Vu, Binh Nguyen

Future Living Space Award Winners. Image Courtesy of NOVA

NOVA Property Investment Co., Ltd. (NOVA) was founded in 2015 by Mr. Wang Qian and strategic investor Warburg Pincus. In 2016, NOVA completed the equity acquisition of Yicheng Creative, a real estate renovation and value-add service provider, and in doing so integrated its professional experience into the NOVA model acquisition, renovation, operation and asset management. In 2018, The Government of Singapore Investment Corp. (GIC) and NOVA officially signed Shareholders Agreement.

Currently, there are 41 projects operating or under constructing with a total investment value of nearly RMB 12 billion and a project area of 400,000 square meters. The projects are in the first-tier cities of Shanghai and Beijing. NOVA’s operating brands include BASE and N² Creative and Yixi. NOVA’s aim is to build brand alliances to meet the diverse needs of different markets and targets.