The winners of this summer’s Design It: Shelter Competition—an online competition that asked participants to create and submit designs for virtual 3-D shelters using Google SketchUp and Google Earth—visited the Guggenheim Museum and Google offices in New York on Thursday, December 17. As part of their competition prize, David Eltang, the Juried Prize winner, and David Mares, the People’s Prize winner, first met with Google staff at their New York offices and were given a behind-the-scenes tour of the block-long office building and treated to lunch in Google’s cafeteria. They then headed to the Guggenheim Museum, where museum director Richard Armstrong welcomed and congratulated the winners. At the museum, David van der Leer, Assistant Curator of Architecture and Design gave them a private tour.

During the visit Eltang, an architect from Aarhus, Denmark, described the intensive four days he spent working on his SeaShelter design, giving himself a self-imposed deadline he adhered to in order to stay productive. The location of the shelter, along the coast of the Wadden Sea, was inspired by trips to the area to visit relatives and was designed for the inhabitant to experience the high tide and to interact with the environment in dramatic ways. Juror and curator of this summer’s accompanying Learning By Doing exhibition, van der Leer, said it possessed “a welcoming quality that the jury viewed as reflective of the spirit of the Design It competition.”

People’s Prize winner Mares, an architect from Setúbal, Portugal, ventured outside of his home country for the first time to make the trip to New York. He initially sent an e-mail to 50 people after his design, Cork Block Shelter, was named one of the ten finalists for the People’s Prize. The use of cork in his shelter, of which Portugal is the main producer, seemed to strike a chord with Portuguese citizens. Soon after he sent the e-mail, Mares found a Facebook page devoted to his shelter, his submission was featured in Público, Portugal’s daily national newspaper, and he was even interviewed on evening news programs.

Over the course of the summer, the competition received submissions from people in 68 countries for a total of nearly 600 entries that met competition requirements. On the occasion of the Guggenheim Museum's 50th Anniversary, we are pleased to congratulate both winners of this unique design challenge.