The fourth Cross-Straits Architectural Design Contest for College Students drew to an end in Fuzhou, Fujian province on Aug 12, with a design mimicking the famous Taihu Lake stone by a team from Hunan University winning first prize.

More than a dozen colleges and universities participated in the contest, including four from Taiwan.

Participants work on their competing pieces at the fourth Cross-Straits Architectural Design Contest in Fuzhou, Fujian province on Aug 10. [Photo/chinanews.com]

The competition is designed to examine college students’ practical knowledge of architecture and the construction process. It is also meant to test the students’ team spirit and ability to innovate.

With a theme of “technology and load”, this year’s contest focused on testing the entries’ technical feasibility and structural stability. Participants were required to apply suitable technologies through the use of unrefined materials to build delicate structures, while paying attention to building loads to meet safety and cost-efficiency requirements.

The winning work uses an impressionist approach to reflect the beauty of the rocks found in the Taihu Lake in East China—limestone eroded into grotesque shapes, which are highly prized in China and often used to decorate gardens.

The winning work by Hunan University evokes the strange Taihu Lake stones, famous in China for decorating gardens. [Photo/hxnews.com]

Standing within a six-square-meter area, the work was built with three- and five-millimeter thick plywood of good ductility by a team of six within six hours.

The unusual structure, although the body looks “loose [and] sponge-like”, bears a load of 15 kilograms, according to Sun Chuhan, an architecture student on the winning team from Hunan University in Changsha, Hunan.

Nanchang University from Nanchang, Jiangxi province and the University of Technology in Taipei, Taiwan won the second prizes, while the third prizes went to Southeast University in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, Cheng Shiu University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, and Hwa Hsia University of Technology in New Taipei City, Taiwan.

Cheng Shiu University’s work Cheng Yu Cheng, which means load-bearing and cultural inheritance, comprises three parts that each symbolizes one of China’s three great cultural traditions: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. It was built through the repeated use of the traditional Chinese architectural component dougong, a unique system of interlocking wooden brackets used to support crossbeams.

This third prize-winning entry by Cheng Shiu University from Kaohsiung, Taiwan comprises three parts that each symbolizes one of China’s three great cultural traditions: Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism. [Photo.hxnews.com]