Rich Haridy – 
The winners of the 2018 Laka Competition have been revealed, collecting an exciting array of strange and innovative conceptual designs that focus on providing architectural or technological solutions to current environmental or social problems.
The Laka Competition is subtitled “Architecture that Reacts” and the main thrust of the contest is to celebrate designs that, “are capable of dynamic interaction with their surroundings.” This is the fourth year the competition has been running and the winners, selected from 130 designs spanning more than 30 countries, are as innovative, experimental and mind-bending as ever.
The top prize in this year’s competition went to American architect Mary Denman, for a fascinating piece entitled Tidal Terrains. The project considers the inevitable nature of rising global sea levels and proposes a hypothetical structure on the Thames River in London. The buoyant structure joins both sides of the river with a landscape spanning restaurants, boulevards and algae farms.
Other highlights selected by the judges for special mentions include the remarkable Platinum City from Sean Thomas Allen, an industry city conceived as an asteroid mine; VolcanoLite, a buoyant research station that can harvest helium ejected from volcanos allowing for a semi-permanent structure to sit above unstable ground; and Surftopia, a beach-pod structure that expands when needed for human habitation and contracts when unoccupied.
The Laka Competition is perhaps one of the more heavily academic and conceptual architectural competitions around, however, it always presents a vast array of innovative designs that push the limits of what we would define as a building.
Take a look through our gallery at the winners and some honorable mentions from this year’s competition.
Source: Laka Competition
(For the source of this article, plus additional illustrations, please visit: https://newatlas.com/laka-competition-2018-reactive-architecture/57585/)