The Buckminster Fuller Challenge Finalists

One of the semifinalists: The Portable Light Project

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge  is an annual international design award grants $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a "bold, visionary, tangible initiative that is focused on a well-defined need of critical importance and comprehensive, anticipatory, integrated approach". 

Winning solutions to the most significant challenges including:

• ocean restoration
• protecting indigenous knowledge
• combating women’s illiteracy
• connecting the remote developing world to the communication grid

"When evaluating these entries we were looking for those projects that mark the emergence of a new paradigm, one that not only addresses the problems but carries us beyond— into a new mode of being. These finalists do just that. Reviewing them has been deeply inspirational"

Jean Gardner, 2011 Challenge Juror

 
Here all the semifinalists

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DUNE - From sand to stone

Photo Magnus Larsson

Photo Magnus Larsson

Thank to a bacteria, sand is solidified into a habitable structure that protects from wind and sand. As the architect Magnus Larsson said: "in this way, we can start 'growing' controlled oases in the desert, and stop the sand from pushing people away from their homes and villages, which, in the worst-case scenario, may lead to huge migration floods, food shortages, wars, and other horrible situations". Starting upon a research carried out by professor Jason De Jong's team at the Soil Interactions Laboratory, UC Davis (http://www.sil.ucdavis.edu/people-jason.htm), as well as conversations with professor Stefano Ciurli at the University of Bologna, Larsson designs to flush a particular microorganism, Bacillus Pasteurii, through the dunescape to cause a biological reaction that turns the sand into solid sandstone.

Photo Magnus Larsson

In 2008, "DUNE – Arenaceous Anti-desertification Architecture" won first prize in the Holcim Awards 'Next Generation' category for Africa/Middle East (http://www.holcimfoundation.org/T865/A08AMng11.htm).

Photo Magnus Larsson

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