THE FUTURE PARK INTERNATIONAL DESIGN IDEAS COMPETITION

The Future Park International Design Competition was an unusual competition. Unlike iconic park competitions such as the 1858 competition for New York’s Central Park, the 1982 competition for Paris’s Parc de la Villette, the 1999 competition for Toronto’s Downsview Park and the 2001 competition for New York’s Fresh Kills, Future Park did not have a specific site. And in contrast to ideas competitions that ask for the site to be found or created (as with LA Plus journal’s call to design an island or International Competitions in Architecture’s series of houses for architects), there was a real city (Melbourne) for designers to grapple with. This combination of the unconstrained nature of an “ideas” competition and the limitations of grounding within place, meant that the entries hovered at the brink of possibility, presenting a wealth of inspiration for the city of Melbourne and beyond.

With more than 120 entries from twenty countries, the competition judges faced an incredible variety and volume of ideas, and thanks to my fellow jurors’ depth of knowledge, humour and stamina, judging was a rich and rewarding process. The jury included Jill Garner (Victorian Government Architect), Julia Czerniak (associate dean and professor of architecture at Syracuse University, New York), Mark Skiba (GHD), well-known philanthropist Susan Alberti, recent landscape architecture graduate Reuben Hore-Waterhouse, with myself as the jury chair. Our complementary skills, experience, and areas of knowledge led to many interesting debates and discussions, and ultimately to the difficult decision of