THE BEGINNING ....

CAPITheticAL invites responses to many questions, including:

• Would you build a new capital today or could the Australian Federation be expressed in a

 different way?

• Would it be a city in the conventional sense or not? If not, what form might it take?

• What ideas would drive its design and development?

• How would 21st century social, political and environmental factors influence the nature

of the city?

• Of what should our national capital consist?

The objectives of the CAPITheticAL design competition are:

• To encourage the best innovative current thinking about city making in this hypothetical

capital city context.

• To examine and understand the forces that informed the decisions on the location, siting,

design and development of Canberra as Australia’s capital.

• To explore how a national capital engages with its nation and how this contributes to

reinforcing national pride.

• To promote collaboration between the diverse range of disciplines that engage in city

making and urban design.

• To speculate on the future of cities and the role of a nation’s capital in the 21st century

and beyond.

• To critically examine how a capital and its architecture express nationhood and serve

national government, while simultaneously providing for the needs of its residents.

This competition, a hypothetical, invites participants to re-imagine the task faced by those whose

job it was to decide how the capital would be created.

Criteria

Submissions are invited that reveal, through hypothetical proposition, creative connections with

the circumstances of the national capital’s establishment. Thus:

• entries should demonstrate knowledge of the original debates and issues that led to design

competition for a new capital;

• participants should be informed by an understanding of the history and design of other planned

capital cities (realised, unrealised and proposed);

• the competition invites participants to respond to questions, among them:

- would you build a new capital today?

- Would it be a city in the conventional sense?

- What ideas would drive its design and development?

- How will 21st century cultural, social, political and environmental factors influence the

nature of the city?

- Of what should our national capital consist?

ement s

Two components are required for submissions which are to be submitted together by the closing

date of 31 January 2012:

(1) The entry should demonstrate knowledge of the debates, influences and processes that led

to the competition for the design of Canberra as Australia’s national capital. This two (2) page

document should provide the rationale for the accompanying hypothetical city design. This

may be written or presented graphically or may be a combination of presentation media.

(2) A hypothetical city design, submitted in a chosen format which contains sufficient detail to fully

explain the proposal to the Jury and to the public attending the exhibition.

Drawn or illustrated submissions are to be limited to 4 x A1 panels or equivalent.