Wonderfruit is Hosting a Sustainable Design Competition for its New Pavilion  

Wonderfruit is Thailand’s pioneering art, music, food and ideas festival with an overall theme to catalyze creativity and make a meaningful positive impact. Every year, it never ceases to impress with awe-inspiring stages made of up of sustainable materials like hemp and bamboo. This year, they’re opening up the floor to the world.

Calling all designers, architects and creators. Wonderfruit has just unveiled an exciting new project that’s more like a dream job for a creative. The open call invites creative minds from all over the world to imagine a community pavilion that is waterproof, sustainable, lightweight, intelligent and evolved for Wonderfruit 2019. The pavilion will be used to showcase an exhibition of the festival’s vision, ideas and ambition that goes into creating the festival each year.

Leading the initiative is British designer Ab Rogers, the mastermind behind some of Wonderfruit’s previous builds like the Theatre of Feasts, the Bath Houses, and the Eco Pavilion. Along with an international jury of design experts including Deyan Sudjic, Farshid Moussavi, Aric Chen, El Ultimo Grito, Lorenzo Alvarez, Brooke Hodge, Rachaporn Choochuey, Dr. Singh Intrachooto, and Boonserm Premthada, they will select the 20 best designs before whittling it down to six. The final six will be given more time to develop their designs before the final winner is selected. Along with a partner, the winner will then be invited to Thailand to spend a month on site at Wonderfruit bringing their creation to life.

Here is what they are looking for:

1. Embody the Wonderfruit ethos, acting as a striking beacon for its powerful brand and supporting and communicating its ethical values.
2. Are waterproof, sustainable, lightweight, intelligent and evolved.
3. Utilise local materials such as grass, bamboo, timber, mud etc. or other innovative sustainable materials.
4. Are 120sqm.
5. Celebrate craft and engineering practices, employing them to create a world-class but locally relevant final design.
6. Are built to last for at least 5 years, with zero negative environmental impact and a sustainable after-life whether upcycled, reused or disintegrated via gradual, organic decomposition or through a more dramatic ritual dissolution.
7. Consider the structure’s evolution over time and its adaptation to changing environmental conditions in a tropical location.
8. Are radical and functional, curious and surprising, while considering modularity, flexibility, expandability, longevity, lightness vs. solidity, etc.
9. Can be built in one month.

Submissions are open to individuals and teams to be submitted before July 15^th by sending an A6-size postcard to wonderfruitopencall@abrogers.com. They should be accompanied by an email including name(s), training/education, occupation, country of residence and age. Find further information on the competition here.

Wonderfruit’s sixth edition takes place from December 12^th – 16^th in Thailand. Tickets for the festival can be purchased here.