LAGI 2025 Fiji
site typology: Island Communities

Beginning on January 6, 2025, LAGI and the Village of Marou invite you to design a beautiful and creatively engaging installation — a work of art in the landscape — that will supply clean and reliable electricity and drinking water to the coastal village’s 67 households, support tourism, and help to build a sustainable future for generations to come.

Award Information
Two winning teams will be provided with a stipend of $100,000 USD each to advance their design proposal and build a functioning prototype of their idea in Fiji.

Based on the success of these prototypes, and in coordination with local authorities and funding partners, the goal is for one project to be chosen for implementation at full-scale as a pilot project with the people of Marou.

Your design solution will help establish a model for co-creation, implementation, and operation of renewable energy and freshwater storage with island nation communities and for exquisite destinations around the world.

Free to Enter and Open to All
Whether you are a professional designer, university professor, student, artist, or anyone passionate about designing for a better world, your participation in LAGI 2025 Fiji will help to advance the evolution of climate adaptation design and destination land art.

LAGI 2025 Fiji Competition Materials
Everything you need to design for this competition including the design guidelines, site details, site photos, supplemental materials, and more will be available here on January 6, 2025.

The competition has been developed in collaboration with Marou Village, an iTaukei community on the southeast coast of Naviti Island in the Yasawa Group archipelago in the Western Ba Region of Fiji.

 

The Context of LAGI 2025 Fiji

LAGI 2025 Fiji focuses our collective creative energies on one of the world’s most pressing challenges — how can island communities preserve and enhance their ways of life in the face of a changing climate?

Rising sea levels, rapidly warming waters, prolonged droughts, and storms of increasing severity are the result of atmospheric greenhouse gas pollution to which island coastal communities have hardly contributed and yet from which they now face the most extreme consequences.

While access to solar energy in Fiji is very good, the implementation of solar power generation presents some interesting challenges, including aesthetics and land use.

An invaluable resource in its own right, the beauty of the landscapes and seascapes of Fiji can be thought about in terms of the sustainability of the local economy, which relies on the tourism industry for 25% of its gross domestic product. Rather than inartfully covering such a paradise with only utilitarian solar panel installations, considerations can also be made for the preservation of the natural beauty of Fiji.

What does it mean to design distributed sustainable infrastructures within this context?

How can exquisite destinations host solar energy systems in ways that advance the interests of communities and provide a range of co-benefits?