CP Kukreja Awards for Design Excellence 2015, a prestigious design award conducted by Foundation for Design Excellence to encourage the role of Youth in imagining future cities, successfully completed its first cycle by felicitating the winners at the Lalit Hotel in New Delhi recently. The glittering awards ceremony was witnessed by a galaxy of audience consisting of Members of Parliament, Governors, Mayor of Delhi, Ambassadors, Architects and Designers hailing from across India and abroad.
The winner of the competition, Mr. Milind Goel of School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi, who presented a vision towards converting highways and road networks into sustainable urban public spaces of future, was presented the First Prize worth `1 lac by Mr. Rajiv Shukla, Honourable Member of the Rajya Sabha and Chairman of the Indian Premier League, while the other honourable winners were felicitated by Mr. Jairam Ramesh, Former Minister of Environment, Government of India. The competition will also provide a strong foundation for the winners to explore and enhance their design skills through encouraging them with opportunities of internships in global destinations like London, Paris, Barcelona, New York and Singapore. All these make this competition one of the most unique initiatives, in scale and magnitude, for fostering competitiveness and out-of-the-box thinking among young designers, which will make a great contribution in re-imagining urban futures.
According to Architect Dikshu C. Kukreja,"The Design Competition is aimed to motivate creativity in thinking, exploration of ideas and inventive design exercises for students of different design disciplines with respect to sustainable design principles and their applicability in envisioning future of cities."
With urban challenges like pollution, lack of civic awareness, depleting natural resources and urban waste generation on the rise, it is time that a serious thought is given to the future health of our cities. Considering the need of such a concern for development to be rooted in the design philosophies of future practices, CP Kukreja Awards for Design Excellence looks forward to become a platform for sharing, nurturing and exhibiting truly innovative solutions imagined by young buddying designers.
The competition received entries that provide smart, ecology–efficient and economic solutions that can ensure a healthy development for our cities for coming generations. The designs varied from Ideas or Concepts which may be considered as Design Models for spreading awareness or educating people the ill-effects of unsustainable methods of development as well as the methods of creating more sustainable and livable urban environments. The entries belonged to disciplines as diverse as Public Art, Interior Design, Urban Design, Civil Engineering, Architecture, Conservation and Public Health Engineering submitted by undergraduate students across India and abroad.
