Two major design competitions, the AMD Open Architecture Challenge and the Metropolis Magazine's NextGeneration, have announced their winners. The winning entries and honorees offer a smorgasboard of truly inspiring solutions for the future of sustainable design, from an architecture and community resource planning, to utterly practical answers to humanitarian needs.

2007 AMD Open Architecture Challenge

The Global Studio, based in Seattle, Wa., took top honors in the 2007 AMD Open Architecture Challenge, in which designers developed plans for a facility that could provide a community in need with access to information technology. The four internationally experienced architectural designers behind the studio (which works exclusively with NGOs and charitable causes) are Stephanie Ingram, Geoff Piper, Matthew Sullivan and Ashley Waldron. Their winning entry will be built, with funds supplied by AMD.

The challenge, proposed to designers around the globe by AMD and Architecture for Humanity, was to develop a facility that empowered a needy community in the developing world through access to information technology.

The Global Studio created the Slums Information Development and Resource Centre (SIDAREC) Technology Hub, a technology-focused community resource center designed for an informal settlement of more than 250,000 people on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya (design by The Global Studio pictured above). SIDAREC, an NGO operating in Kenya's impoverished rural communities, maintains the philosophy that "community problems need community solutions," and the winning design integrates that meme into its process: The community center will not be ready for construction until the designers have integrated community feedback into their model and created something that uniquely answers the needs and desires of the people who will use it.