Architecture Festival Petra

This year, Architecture Festival’s theme of “Breathing Buildings: Building as the New Lungs of the Planet” highlights the significant benefits of vegetation and its impact towards the environment. As an example, the usage of vegetation within a building can be utilized as a method to achieve thermal comfort and reduce radiation rates within a building. By achieving thermal comfort through the usage of vegetation alone points to the possibility of reducing significant energy usage within buildings. The usage of vegetation may also correlate with the improvement of microclimate, and other benefits and positive impacts vegetation may bring when integrated with building design. Thus, this theme strives to increase the participants’ knowledge and understanding towards the potential of vegetation in building design. Not only that, participants are also encouraged to look to plants and vegetation as sources of inspiration and use biomimicry to aid their design process. In conclusion, this competition wishes to rouse the participants to search for innovative methods to integrate building and vegetation in an appropriate, contextual, and effective manner.