The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia and HP are pleased to announce the 4th Advanced Architecture Contest, on the theme of CITY-SENSE: Shaping our environment with real-time data.

The aim of the competition is to promote discussion and research through which to generate insights and visions, ideas and proposals that help us envisage what the city and the habitat of the 21st century will be like.

The competition is open to architects, engineers, planners, designers and artists who want to contribute to progress in making the world more habitable by developing a proposal capable of responding to emerging challenges in areas such as ecology, information technology, architecture, and urban planning, with the purpose of balancing the impact real-time data collection might have on sensor-driven cities.

The competition jury, which is composed of architects, professionals in a wide range of fields and directors of some of the world's foremost architecture schools, is looking for outstanding proposals at any scale, for any city in the world. Competition entries should be submitted via the Internet on Smart Cities, Eco neighborhoods, Self-sufficient buildings, Intelligent homes or any other proposal that analyzes the phenomena of sensor-driven cities and intelligent behavioural systems.

The proposal should include whatever texts, videos, drawings and other images may be needed to make it fully understandable.

The competition prizes will consist of: Three scholarships for the IaaC Masters in Advanced Architecture program for academic year 2012-13, cash prizes, and an HP latest-generation printer. The selected projects will go on show in a major exhibition, opening in Barcelona in May 2012, which will travel to key cities around the world. The best projects will also be featured in a book to be published by Actar-Birkhauser, like in the three previous editions: Self-Sufficient Housing, Self-Fab House and Self-SufficientT City.

Promises to be an interesting challenge to the architectural fraternity worldwide.