Our Managing Partner was invited to participate as a judge in the 2014 version of CORMA Competition for Students of Architecture. The theme this time was the infrastructure for urban mobility.
The Wood Technological Transfer Center, CORMA’s CTT, developed the IX Wood Architecture Contest and the Third Design in Wood Contest, contests created for students from local universities in order to promote these disciplines and teamwork, spread knowledge of wood and wood engineering products, and the research into their potential. Also, for the first time this year, Innovation and Engineering projects took part of the competition.
One objective of the contest is “to promote and encourage the knowledge of wood and products of wood and seismic engineering materials, research into its enormous potential, its technologies, its many uses and applications in the area of construction such as structures, fences, siding, finishes, etc., together with the development of architectural and structural design appropriate to the theme of the contest.”
As Martin Hurtado, Director of the Contest, noted, the definition of the location for any project should be up to each team as well as “thinking” its development in wood, “because one of the things we looked for was to conclude that the project wasn’t possible to build but in wood”, said the professional.
More than 60 architectural projects participated and the first place was given to USACH students. The project consists of a system of river taxis to Valdivia, with the provision of a taxi station on the river bank near downtown, in order to decongest the city and arrange the transport through the same watercourse.
In this regard, structural engineer’s opinion was: “The winning project had a correct solution, serving the requested order, strongly oriented to public transport. The structural solution, which is the area that concerns me, is completely feasible and the group of the University of Santiago expressed conceptual clarity of the structure in both the planimetric information as the model.”
