Designing Excellence Through A Competition And Rigs.volution

With the mission of preparing students of engineering and architecture towards professional excellence, once again MSSA and CIDB jointly run the Open Ideas Competition (OIC), whose objectives are to bridge design with construction, especially in the use of steel as a building material. Steel has tremendous potential and inertia to propel the construction industry and the event is a great platform for architectural and engineering students to learn to work together and discover ways they could reach greater heights in their professions.

Themed High Rise Residence for Students, or HRS, the 2015 OIC brought together 162 students and 15 supervisors from 10 participating universities to design a hall of residence that provides all the essential facilities that create the social and recreational environments governed by by-laws, authority and university's management requirements. The residential complex should also support community living, be almost self-contained and integrated with the community and contributing positively to it. The end product: a living space that inspires and empowers students into becoming productive and dynamic citizens.

The contestants needed to focus on functionality in planning, producing innovative solutions that relate to context, scale and building users. They also had to emphasise on the use of local materials in creating quality spaces and integration with the site context whilst retaining the natural physical features of the site as much as possible.

Obviously this was no easy feat; among the many challenges the contestants had to overcome include complying with the social and religious norms of Malaysian students, making sure that the facilities can be let out to outsiders during the quite months of the semester breaks, employing creative use of Industrialized Building System (IBS) and of course, using steel as the main struct