Competition Introduction
The CAPITheticAL competition invites designers...to review Canberra’s history and imagine
how an Australian national capital might be created in the 21st century. Proposals should demonstrate an awareness of the national capital’s rich history, including the debates, influences and processes that led to the competition in 1911–12 for the design of Canberra as Australia’s national capital.
Objectives
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.
Key Proposition
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.
http://www.capithetical.com.au/
