Sunnyvale, Calif. - Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Cameron Sinclair, winner of last year's TED Prize and founder of Architecture for Humanity, announced the premiere Open Architecture Prize at the annual TED Conference.
The $250,000 Open Architecture Prize is the largest prize in the field of architecture and is designed to be a multiyear program that draws competition from design teams around the world.
Each year, a winning design will be selected from a field of low-cost, sustainable design projects and built in a selected community. The first project for the Open Architecture Prize will be an "e-community center," a centralized building equipped with Internet connectivity solutions designed to enable an entire community to access the transformative power of the Internet. The winning designs will be built as part of the prize and in alignment with the 50x15 Initiative, a program founded by AMD to connect 50 percent of the world's population to the Internet by 2015.
After the winning designs are built, the plans will be made openly available through the Open Architecture Network, an open-source online gathering place created to fulfill the wish Sinclair was granted through last year's TED Prize.
The network was unveiled yesterday at TED 2007 by Sinclair and a number of project supporters, including AMD, Hot Studio, and Sun Microsystems Inc. It brings together architects, designers, and community organizers to share blueprints, ideas, and resources for improvement projects in areas affected by geo-political, environmental, or economic hardship. The Open Architecture Network is hosted on Sun's Sun Fire servers based on AMD Opteron processors at AMD's global headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif.
"For far too long many great award-winning designs have gone undeveloped," says Cameron Sinclair, executive director and co-founder, Architecture for Humanity. "Through the Open Architecture Network and the Open Architecture Prize, we are not only challenging the creative world to design innovative structures, we are going one step further and implementing the winning solution to positively affect thousands of lives."