You can read more in dezeen.

Teams from nine countries (Colombia, Canada, USA, UK, Germany, Italy, Norway, Poland, Brazil) submitted their proposals to the BEE / HOUSE / LAB competition, which challenged participants to create a bee house for 80-100 solitary nesting bees, a species under threat from habitat loss.

About 50 winning bee house designs were installed by the University of Manitoba Parks Canada Campus Club, a group of student outdoor enthusiasts, and the houses will now be monitored by the university’s department of entomology.

As bee researcher professor Robert Currie told UM Today, “the nest in its essence is a block with holes in it. But the design component is to make that attractive from both the human and bee perspective, and also make something that can be manipulated and managed… and hopefully make people key in on the idea that they should be aware of the need for bees.”

The design models showcase excellence in sustainable design and innovation.

“Learning and research partnerships like BEE / HOUSE / LAB are an example of how the University of Manitoba is leading the charge on sustainable development,” says Ian Hall, the director of the U of M’s Office of Sustainability. “Using the campus as a living lab and integrating best practices into our operations helps us reduce our environmental footprint and contributes to the University’s mission.”

All project descriptions and images can be accessed via Dropbox. 

THE WINNERS

Open competition

The “Knaves turn’d Honest” beehouse

First place: Knaves turn’d Honest
Chad Morgan Connery and Anca Matyiku (University of Manitoba and McGill University)

Excerpt from project description:

The “Knaves turn’d Honest” beehouse explores the crossovers and slippages of (im)perceptible communication between humans and solitary bees. It operates as a sign-post inscribed with layers of information that either favour or deny the sensory apparatus of both bees and humans.

A broken pattern of indigo dominates the surface in order to titillate its future inhabitants. Invisible to the bees, a speckled red peak makes it easy to spot across the field by its human caretakers. To further appeal to pollinator communities, a layer of transparent ultra-violet reflective paint is stenciled onto the sides to simulate the glow of pollen dust.

As a playful but probing gesture, this layer – only perceptible to humans by way of specialized instruments – is actually inscribed with an excerpt of text from Bernard Mandeville’s poem “The Grumbling Hive, or Knaves turn’d Honest.” It was part of Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees; or Private Vices, Publick Benefits”, a controversial theory of economics, first published anonymously in the early eighteenth century. It anticipates the “invisible hand” theory and builds an allegory of the hive in order to suggest that the satisfaction of private desires contributes to cultural growth that benefits society at large.

Second Place: XOXO
Michael Mazurkiewicz and Derek Smart (Ryerson University)

The XO bee houses

Excerpt from project description:

The XO bee houses are a friendly resting place for solitary pollinator bees. Their purpose is to generate and broadcast mass public awareness of the paramount relationship between bees and society, by asserting themselves within urban and campus contexts. The marriage of X’s and O’s intends to spark the curiosity of the spectator. The houses are scattered randomly across each chosen site – ultimately intended for dispersion throughout urban centres within parks, gardens, and rooftops.

Within these landscapes, the dwellings are linked by the golden thread of the pollinating bee. In the virtual realm and the realm of social media these recognizable symbols are intended to spread virally. The houses will act as informative tools by cross-pollinating and embedding themselves within Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

The pattern and colour of each house is a site-specific reflection of native crops and floral palettes. In Manitoba, this consists of a soft wheat engraving on the exterior of the dwelling, and a palette derived from regional wildflowers loved by bees – among them: pasqueflower, hyssop, goldenrod, and coneflower. The individuality of each house stems from the flora of each habitat.

Olawinger beehouse

Third place: Olawinger
Owen Nichols and Sissily Harrell (Architectural Designers, USA)

Excerpt from project description:

Olawinger turns an inside out. It captures a familiar yet mysterious, alluring and often unattainable interior volume that a bee seeks for refuge. It offers a simple and obvious solution to feral bee housing in an uncanny urban object. Passers-by may interact with an overt, amorphous shell that presents a form only creatures of the wood are privy to. On the inside, grotesque contours set against a holey wooden block define a stark resemblance to the insect’s typical lair.

Student competition

First place: subur-bee-a
Brandon Bergem (University of Toronto; alumnus of U of M environmental design) and Megan Krahn (OCAD)

subur-bee-a

Excerpt from project description:

Extensive monoculture and urbanization is a major issue in the sustainability of tunneling bees, coupled with global warming, they face immense opposition in their continued existence. Addressing these issues and seeking to spark public interest, subur-bee-a is a reclamation of urban space, creating a sprawling bee habitat that provides flora diversity and seasonal pollinating opportunity, as well as visually appealing infrastructure that encourages public interaction and use.

Several housing units are created, limiting to 1 to 50 holes of various sizes. The reduction of holes per unit demands increased sprawl to the overall number of housing units built, thus a greater footprint in the landscape, which repossesses and restores the urban space into bee habitat. The bee-habitat form references and distorts gabled roof suburban housing typology resulting in a variety of scales creating a surrealist field of micro-dwellings.

Subur-bee-a encourages further bee urbanization through the use of attached garden-box-benches, which contain prairie suitable plants attractive to bees that grow from spring until fall. The plants grown are common consumed edibles, which provides a landscape mutually beneficial for bee inhabitants as well as human visitors. The waffle structure appears to extrude out from the landscape, a building park infrastructure that is visually impacting that fosters public awareness and provides engagement opportunities.

Second place: “NOT THE BEES”
Evan Taylor and Matt Hagen (Carleton University; U of M environmental design alumni)

“NOT THE BEES”

Excerpt from project description:

We propose a design for a contemporary bee inhabitation that reflects the sociocultural references and implications of the time. Drawing on recent as well as current events in the pop-culture world we can extrapolate a unique dichotomy between several seemingly unconnected positions. By understanding the fragile and intricate natures of the honey-producing bee populations new considerations for form and application of controlled inhabitations can be explored. Overlaying an unrelenting and ongoing pop-culture narrative upon the timeline of the past century’s potential bee extinction scare a new and formally appropriate manifestation of our culture’s bees can be realized. In our design we reject the idea that form may follow function of the space; instead form will follow pop-historical flux.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

Open Competition

• Valerie Chartrand and Jess Dixon (Dixon Design, Manitoba)
• Simone Goldate and Anna Aubry (Burns + Nice, United Kingdom)

Student Competition

• Gabriel Lago, Felipe Fuentes, Marco Maron, Guilherme Santoucy, Felipe Sanches, and Guilherme Rabelo  (VOXEL LAB, Brazil)
• Aaron Pollock (University of Manitoba)
• Wei Zou (University of Manitoba)

Winners of the BEE / HOUSE / LAB competition will receive prizes courtesy of Propolis-Etc… a major Canadian beekeeping supply company.

A new Interdisciplinary Indigenous Design Studio was launched for the Fall 2015 term. Students are working with Navajo Nation on a small town on the New Mexico/Arizona state line. In coordination with the University of New Mexico the project involves environmental design students as well as graduate students of landscape architecture.

Co-taught by Marcella Eaton, Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Chair of the Environmental Design Program, and Ralph Stern, Professor in the Department of Architecture, the Studio supports these strategic priorities with the added goal of engaging the challenge of “Indigenizing” the curriculum. In a recent article published in the Faculty of Architecture’s Network magazine, Stern writes about what it means to “Indigenize” the curriculum.

“Having embraced the principle of Indigenous design in [the Faculty Strategic Plan], an ambitious implementation plan will enable the Faculty of Architecture to become a national and international leader in this field. This will enable us to attract and educate Indigenous designers to become leaders in professional design fields. Indigenizing the curriculum is a vital and necessary step towards achieving this goal. Achieving this would, in turn, support the advancement of Indigenous design in our professional programs.”

Stern concludes:

“Many of the issues facing Indigenous communities today are environmental in nature: they are issues impacting watersheds and food sheds, contamination and reclamation, as well as designing healthy environments for future generations. The locus for this, as mentioned at the opening of this text, is most appropriate in the Environmental Design Program, embracing all students and all design disciplines within the Faculty. It would also be appropriately located in a Faculty-based PhD Program for those interested in developing specific expertise in topics addressed broadly in the undergraduate program. It is these loci, undergraduate and post-graduate, in which disciplinary borders for a professional Faculty must be permeable: supporting and expanding the professional disciplines at the graduate level. International borders must be equally permeable, and the Faculty of Architecture is well positioned to serve as a conduit for Indigenous peoples to move across all borders in order to facilitate and implement Indigenous design. This must be led with a vision, now outlined in the Faculty Strategic Plan 2015-2020, that is not only continental, but truly global in ambition and scope.”

Read more from Stern in the 2014-2015 Network.

“The frozen rivers are one of the most fantastic public spaces that I’ve ever encountered and the warming huts really activate that space and allow for a celebration of Winnipeg winter,” says Ralph Stern, dean of the Faculty of Architecture. “The warming huts make the community much more aware of the importance of design in activating public spaces, even those that might not necessarily be understood in terms of their full potential. So it enhances and celebrates and, in the best of all senses, it can bring together a community around shared values.”

What’s of special importance this year is that all of the students involved in this particular entry are from other places than Canada. On the team this year there are two students from China and one from Brazil with their entry “Mirror Cloaking.”

Participating in the warming huts competition, “Positions the faculty in terms of its growing international connectivity,” says Stern. “And I think it’s wonderful that students from all over the world now are essentially coming here and are involved in the celebration of winter weather in Winnipeg.”

Indeed, the warming huts competition is increasingly building an audience from outside of Winnipeg, even expanding beyond Canada’s borders. Articles on sites like Gizmodo and in the New York Times have placed Winnipeg on the map as an unlikely winter destination.

Carol Eckstein and her husband Marty are from Chicago. They saw the piece in the Times and decided to check out Winnipeg for the first time.

“We came to Winnipeg for the weekend for the skating, and the enjoyment of winter, combined with the architecture and museums and food, which we read about first in the New York Times,” says Carol.

“We hope to see a number of the huts on our first skate. It’s really exciting. What a great concept. I think it makes the outdoors more accessible. My husband loves to skate. We also like art and museums, and design and architecture so we thought it was a great combination.”

The warming huts are drawing more and more visitors from outside Winnipeg. Sara Donaldson came from Minneapolis to check out the river trail.

“I love two things about this. I love being able to skate as a form of transportation because normally we skate in circles and there’s something very magical about being able to move to another location on skates. I also love that Winnipeg embraces their northernness. You know, if you’re going to be cold, then lets have a lot of fun with cold and that’s what’s happening here,” Donaldson says.

Not only are people coming to the warming huts, but warming huts and its concept are sprouting up across the continent. Similar competitions are taking shape in both Boston and Toronto. A previous entry from the Faculty of Architecture is even going to Ottawa for yet another event spinning off of the Winnipeg idea.

“I think in many ways there is an increasing realization of the importance of celebrating winter. Since Winnipeg seems to be the nexus of underscoring that, it’s nice to have people following Winnipeg,” says Stern. “The warming huts give [students] a fantastic opportunity to test out ideas, to see what it means to realize ideas and to see a direct impact that their ideas — already as undergraduate students — can have in the public realm.”

The Mirror Cloaking” shelter proposal by U of M Faculty of Architecture students, Wong Zheng, Rafael Vieira Leal and Wei Zou.

The winning team’s shelter will be included among others chosen from over 100 submissions from around the world in Warming Huts v. 2015: An Art + Architecture Competition, an annual competition now in its sixth year.

The “Mirror Cloaking” shelter, by U of M students Wong Zheng, Rafael Vieira Leal, Wei Zou, uses one-way mirrors and polished stainless steel panels to create a mirror box that allows skaters to perceive the warming hut from outside as part of the winter landscape — yet closer inspection reveals that the hut is a reflection of its surroundings. And once inside, skaters can see out.

The students say, “The design plays with the idea that the enclosed structure become transparent and visitors can still find warmth within an ‘open’ space.”

“The Faculty of Architecture, with its large and very successful undergraduate Environmental Design Program, is honoured and pleased to participate again in the Warming Huts event,” says Ralph Stern, dean of the faculty. “It is a great opportunity to underscore the fundamental interrelationship between design and environment in a prominent location celebrating both Winnipeg and Manitoba.”

The Mirror Cloaking” shelter proposal by U of M Faculty of Architecture students, Wong Zheng, Rafael Vieira Leal and Wei Zou.

This year’s competition includes an art installation category. The submissions were reviewed by a blind jury, which includes U of M alumnus and trailblazer Sasa Radulovic. The jury narrowed the entries to two winning shelter designs and one installation.

“Over the years, we’ve pushed the envelope on the word ‘Warming Hut,’” says Paul Jordan, chief executive officer of The Forks Renewal Corporation. “More and more, we’ve seen the designs resemble less of a hut and become more about attention to design and detail. The completion has become a competitive space for artists and architects to dream and see their dream into reality. And the best part is that it’s really allowed us to make high-end art and architecture accessible to everyone.”

Other structures on this year’s trail will include “Recycling Words,” designed by KANVA Architecture from Montreal, “The Hole Idea,” designed by Weiss Architecture & Urbanism Limited from Toronto, Canada and “This Big” by Tina Soil & Luca Roncoroni from Droebak Akershus, Norway, who also won in Warming Huts v.2013 for their entry, “Wind Catcher.”

Over the years, the Warming Hut competition has also attracted some great additions. This year, Kelvin High School, with the help from Red River Mutual, has designed and will be constructing a hut entitled 6043.

Architecture alumnus Joe Kalturnyk conceived the RAW:almond concept.

And after much success, RAW:almond, an outdoor popup restaurant on the trail, will also bring its unique outdoor restaurant experience back to the trail. Architecture alumnus Joe Kalturnyk conceived the RAW:almond concept and collaboration, which enters its third year.

Construction of the huts will take place in early January, weather permitting, and will be on the Red River Mutual Trail the third week of the same month.

The winning team (l to r): Wong Zheng, Rafael Vieira Leal, Wei Zou.

Warming Huts v. 2015: An Art + Architecture Competition is made possible through the support of: the Canada Council for the Arts, Manitoba Association of Architects, University of Manitoba, Faculty of Architecture & Partners Program and KGS Group.