The compeitial is over—long live the competitial! Picking through the manifold entries, pouring in from every corner of the known world, one fact became manifest: That architects, taken on the whole, are batsh*t insane.

The competition, as you will recall, was to design a universal green room, a fantastical routing center for the laid-off architects of the world: a place where they could do such things as architects do—or find new things that architects should do in order to reorient the profession for these Globally Pigf*!ked times. The elicited responses ran the gamut: One contestant, deserving special mention, simply sent in Polaroids of Grant’s Tomb; another sketched plans for an indefinite series of hyper-mediated baby cribs (“networked hibernation modules”); still another built a model of a perfectly charming mid-century suburban living room, complete with conversation pit, accompanied by a legend describing the scale as approximately 1:100,000,000,000—making the living room roughly the size of Oakland. We thank all these entrants with the rest—but to the victors go the tacos.

The winner, one of whose images appears above, is “WARD aka Come on IN”, submitted by Meredith Baber, Terry Surjan, and Shota Ba of C U P, a design research group based in Blacksburg, VA. More of C U P’s winning images, along with our speculative critical ruminations thereon, appear after the jump—along with a look at runner-up Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, an engineering outfit based in New York. Congratulations to both.

C U P’s submission is a conceptual project, one that doesn’t purport any built work so far as we can tell. The images—which might be assembled into a slide show, or better yet a portable manifesto, a pocket bible for the desperate architect—describe a series of strategies which remain largely in the realm of potentials: rather than issuing explicit mandates, C U P teases out the latent meanings of the “ward”, the holding pen called for in the competition brief.

Operating on a loosely Derridean model, C U P plays a language game that’s neither determined nor specifically programmatic as an approach to design, but implies a recursive technique: the architect can act on these words (“draw” a building, put it in a communal “drawer”), and at the same time discover other possibilities lurking in the language of this new discipline (the architect’s own status as a “drawer” or receptacle of design ideas; their obligation both to be a “warder” and a “ward” of other architects). This action has a kind of mimetic quality, the architects milling around the the idea of their holding pen, the idea of their unemployment, just as they might mill around an actual holding pen. But the charm of C U P’s proposal is that it doesn’t simply leave the architects pursuing stale and insular hermeneutics of their own condition; instead, the “ward” is found to be located in a web of social imperatives, bringing the architects out of their isolation and encouraging them to engage their public without the usual constraints of the profession—that is to say, jobs.

Our runners-up, Simpson, Gumpertz & Hegert, went a different route: polemic, pure and simple.

Take that, fancy-pants architects! The accompanying images appear to be renderings of a thin-shell concrete siphon: the best thing to do with all the unemployed architects is to shove them down a really well-built tube. That’ll teach ‘em.