RIBA Bookshops

Created for students and professionals to inspire changes in how new buildings are designed and constructed, the Self-Sufficient competition challenged participants to design a self-sufficient and ecologically oriented dwelling. In the early 20th century, the concept of 'dwelling' was often defined as a "machine for living", a quote made famous by Le Corbusier in 1923 which madereference to a new way of understanding the construction of inhabitable spaces that characterised the Machine Age. Today we face the challenge of constructing a sustainable or self-sufficient dwelling, a living organism that interacts with its environment, exchanging resources, and which functions as an entirely independent entity.

The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC) has collected a selection of entries presented during its 1st Advanced Architecture Contest: Self-Sufficient Housing. Students and architects jostle each other as they seek to catch the reader's eye with their ideas, swarming through the book in a riot of colour, plans and invention. The prize-winners receive more space, as is their due.

The MicroCosm House (1st Prize Single Housing) is made of elements intrinsic to the site, with the envelope expanding in summer, for ventilation, and contracting in winter, for insulation. Ecosystem Injections (1st Prize Collective Housing) seeks to insert artificial ecosystems into areas of a city to answer its ecological needs and also provides for hybrid-ecological towers, working together as nodes in a web deploying differing energy generating process.

As well as the winners, there is an absolute plethora of exotica with enticing names such as the Urban Rhizome, NOAH's autARK and Skplbdspb2, a building that adjusts the space available to the needs of the inhabitants. A fascinating collection.