Design the Future of Safari

African Bush Camps has partnered with Eleven Magazine for their eighth international architecture & design competition, ‘Safari: Zimbabwe 2017’. The challenge calls on creatives from all around the world to design innovative concepts for a Super Sensory Safari lodge in the heart of Matobo National Park.

In Swahili, the word ‘safari’ means journey, and this is exactly where Eleven and African Bush Camps want to take you through our competition: a journey into the romance and adventure of the wild, into the customs, local rituals and the beating heart of Africa, through your senses. The outcome of this journey? A new Super Sensory Safari lodge concept the likes of which the world has never seen before, nestled in the heart of Matobo’s granite rock formations and mysterious ancient rock paintings.

Together with Eleven Magazine, we are asking people to enter this competition and inspire the design of a new type of safari lodge. One that is motivated by the principles of biomimicry, one which blends traditional wildlife adventure activities with new ones linked with culture, tradition and conservation, and one which allows our visitors to experience its unique context fully. We are looking for a Super Sensory Safari lodge, the first one in the world, which uses design as a pivotal part of the experience.

In this challenge, we welcome creatives (professionals and/or students) to join in. We want you to imagine a Super Sensory Safari camp in all of its glory and contextualise the experience through architecture. Participants, who can compete individually or in a team of up to two people, are asked to register and submit their proposals, in the form of two digital A1 horizontal sheets and 500 words explanation text. The submission deadline is the 11th of January 2018, with winners announced in March. The lucky winners will be able to experience, first-hand, the unforgettable adventure of Zimbabwe by winning 2 places onto African Bush Camps’ Super Sensory Safari, located in the stunning Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe.

The jury panel features some of our favourite industry partners and friends, including Derek Solomon, Animal Behaviour & Communication Specialist, Author and Private Guide; Debra Fox and Chris Browne, the owners of Fox Browne Creative, our interior design gurus who have worked on our existing camps; Rob Janisch, Biomimicry & Genius of Nature Expert and Private Guide as well as Charlene Hewat, CEO of Environment Africa. Beks Ndlovu, Founder and CEO of African Bush Camps, will also be on the jury panel, as well as the founders and editors of Eleven Magazine, Andrea Verenini and Eloise Carr.

For this competition, we invite you to take an architectural safari into one of the wildest, most exciting and beautifully unique corners of Zimbabwe: UNESCO’s Matobo National Park. Through this competition we ask participants, “What does the safari lodge of the future look like?”

For more information on African Bush Camps and Eleven’s Safari challenge and to register, please visit the competition page.

‘Safari’ is Eleven’s eighth international competition to date. Since their creation in mid-2015, the challenges launched by this UK based magazine and creative agency have received great international success. Previous challenges have been exhibited in Europe and the USA, published in multiple international magazines such as the Architecture Review, the AJ, Dezeen, Archdaily and Designboom, and have been featured in Bustler’s ‘Top-10 Best Competitions of the Year Awards’ in both 2015 and 2016.

Eleven is an online architecture platform interested in design-led innovation. Part of what they do is organise and run international competitions. They have plans to launch a whole variety of design and architecture competitions in the coming months. Past competitions by Eleven include the award winning Cambodia 2015 (3rd place in Buster’s Competition of the Year Award 2015, exhibited in London’s Covent Garden in association with the Architecture Review and also exhibited at Boston’s BAC), San Francisco 2016, Moontopia (7th place in Buster’s Top Ten Best Competitions of the Year Award 2016), Biomimicry, Rome 2017 and Planetarium. Our current live competitions are Shelter 48 (a challenge focusing on post disaster emergency life support systems) due to close on the 11th of November and Safari, running until the 11th of January 2018