Young ideas for building with textiles wanted – Student competition with cash prizes worth a total of € 8,000

A part of many elements, from membrane roofs and smart façades to lightweight constructions, fibre-based materials are a component part of architecture and building. With its ‘Textile Structures for New Building’ competition for students, Techtextil, International Trade Fair for Technical Textiles and Nonwovens, aims once again to put the spotlight on young people and invites students of civil engineering, product design and related disciplines, as well as young professionals, to enter the competition with their ideas for building with textiles or textile-reinforced materials.

Assignment
The competition covers all aspects of building with textiles and entrants are free to choose any subject of relevance to this. Both supervised and unsupervised projects will be accepted.
The assignment for students and young professionals participating in the ‘Textiles Structures for New Building 2017’ contest which will be presented at Techtextil 2017 is to create solutions in the following areas of textile building:

• Structural engineering – from construction using textile-reinforced concrete or plastics to construction using membranes for permanent and temporary, adaptable and mobile buildings
• Interior construction – including such developments as the use of polymer fibre-optic cables for light transmission, textile air-channel systems for draught-free air conditioning in rooms, movable sound-insulation walls in production facilities, etc.
• Product design for architecture
• Civil and industrial engineering

The jury
An independent, international jury of experts comprising renowned academics, architects (building with textiles) and engineers will judge the works submitted. The Chairman of the jury is Prof Werner Sobek.
When selecting entries, the jury mainly will take into account these criteria:

• Feasibility and practicability
• Use of textile and innovative materials
• Level of innovation
• Aesthetics / Design approach
• Ecological quality / Resource efficiency (e.g. energy efficiency)
• Functionality
• Economic quality (cost minimization / time and process optimization)

Prizes
The winners will share prize money totalling € 8,000, sponsored by the TensiNet association. Awards will be given in the following categories: macro-architecture, micro-architecture, material innovations, the environment & ecology and composites & hybrid structures.
This competition is designed to identify innovative thinking and innovative solutions to problems, featuring construction projects capable of concrete realisation which use textiles or textile reinforced materials. A further aim is to encourage students and new entrants to the professions. The competition is further intended to strengthen contacts between the younger generation, the universities, the technical-textiles industry and broad sections of the building industry.

Textile construction: the future of construction and architecture
Filigree design, lightness, corrosion resistance and material efficiency: without these characteristics future architecture is unimaginable. Based on these characteristics, textile research institutes and companies have been researching in the past years fiber-based alternative building materials and developing marketable products which shall increasingly replace conventional materials like steel and offer equal or even better material properties. How near the future of textile construction is will be demonstrated at this year’s Techtextil trade fair where scientists and manufacturers will present their current developments in the field of construction and architecture.

Techtextil presents innovative textile concrete, membranes and foils for Buildtech
As the international leading trade fair taking place every two years, Techtextil will show from 9 to 12 May, 2017 all product lines and fields of application of technical textiles and nonwovens. About 500 exhibitors presented within the Buildtech area of application new developments regarding textile building materials, during the last edition. Techtextil expects the number of exhibitors in the field of buildtech to growth even further for the coming edition. The offered materials are tightly focused on architects, builder-owners, civil engineers and construction managers.

Further information and registration at

Messe Frankfurt Exhibition GmbH
Frankfurt / Main, Germany