Urban Mixed-Use Design Challenge-Design a centrally located mixed-use building in Autodesk Revit with commercial spaces (Ground + 1st floor) and residential units (up to 8 floors). 1 Level of Basement (Car Parking + EV Charging), Total (B+G+9)(Note: Plot size and all required dimensions may be assumed by students (in mm units).
Autodesk · Smart Education · Software
This is an architecture studio project wearing a hackathon label and it is judged on rendering craft — unless your team includes an architecture student who lives in Revit, there is nothing here a software team can win.
What it actually is
Design a ten-storey mixed-use building — basement parking with EV charging, shops on the lower two floors, apartments above — fully modelled in Autodesk Revit with structural drawings and a rendered walkthrough. This is an architecture assignment. There is no software development in it at all.
What to build
A complete Revit model of a basement-plus-ground-plus-nine building containing all essential elements — beams, columns, slabs, stairs, flooring — with a climate-responsive facade system, a central landscape courtyard and green terraces and balconies for ventilation and daylight, functional commercial planning on the lower floors and efficient residential unit layouts above, accompanied by 2D structural detailing drawings for key components and a presentation of rendered views, facade studies, diagrams and a thirty-second walkthrough animation.
Smallest thing that wins the room
Play the walkthrough animation moving from the commercial ground floor up through the central courtyard to a residential terrace, with the facade studies showing how the system responds to sun angle and ventilation.
How crowded this one gets
A guess, projected from the 2025 statements — the last year where both the submission counts and the winners were published.
Quieter than 64% of the 226 · #82 of 226 by expected field
A normal-sized field. Your idea has to be good, not miraculous.
Why: company-sponsored statements drew the smallest fields of all.
This is a guess, not a fact
Nobody has published 2026’s numbers yet. This is an analysed estimate from last year’s pattern, so please do not take it as the truth — check the live counter on the SIH portal before you decide anything. The range covers the middle half of likely outcomes, so one statement in two lands outside it. Entry closes at 500 ideas per statement, so no range goes past that — a statement that reaches the cap fills and shuts rather than drawing an unlimited crowd. The model reads only three things a team can see before choosing — software or hardware, the theme, and what kind of body posted it — and those explain about a quarter of the variation in last year’s field sizes (R² 0.25 on held-out statements). Trust the band more than the number, and the ordering more than either. It cannot see how good your idea is, which is the part that actually decides it.
The scores
The number is the shorthand. The line under it is the reason.
Acceptance potential
2/5Rendering quality is stated as a key judging criterion, which means this is won on architectural visualisation craft — a domain where architecture students have years of advantage and a software team has none, with no code written anywhere in the submission.
Feasibility
2/5Revit modelling of a ten-storey building with structural detailing is architecture coursework requiring real proficiency in the tool, and a team without an architecture member cannot produce anything that will stand next to submissions from students who model buildings every semester.
Innovation scope
3/5The programme is fixed down to floor counts and uses, so your creative room is confined to the facade system, the courtyard treatment and the unit planning — real architectural decisions, but within tight constraints.
Clarity
5/5The building programme is specified exactly — basement plus ground plus nine, commercial on two floors, residential above, EV charging in the basement — along with the required elements, the drawings and the presentation format.
Effort
MassiveModelling ten storeys with full structural elements, producing 2D detailing drawings and rendering a walkthrough animation is a semester-scale architecture project.
Demo-ability
EasyArchitectural walkthroughs and rendered views are immediately impressive to any audience, and the description names rendering quality and visual storytelling as explicit evaluation criteria.
In its favour
- Green flag: Plot size and dimensions may be assumed by the team, which removes site constraints and lets you design to your strengths
- Green flag: Rendered walkthroughs are among the most immediately impressive deliverables possible in a presentation
- Green flag: The optional Forma environmental analysis adds analytical rigour for one to two hours of extra work
- Green flag: The brief is fully specified, so there is no risk of misunderstanding what to produce
Against it
- Red flag: There is no programming in this problem at all, so a computer science team is competing entirely outside its discipline
- Red flag: Rendering quality and visual storytelling are named as key evaluation criteria, and that is a craft skill built over years rather than a weekend
- Red flag: Ten storeys with full structural detailing is a semester-length architecture assignment compressed into a hackathon
- Red flag: Only Revit may be used and AI-generated content is prohibited, so no shortcuts are available
What you will be writing
- Autodesk Revit (mandatory)
- Revit structural modelling and detailing
- Facade system parametric modelling
- Rendering and walkthrough animation (Enscape / Revit)
- Autodesk Forma for sun path and wind study (optional)
- 2D construction drawing production
- Architecture
- Building information modelling
- Sustainable design
Prior art to read before you start
mixed-use building design · BIM modelling and detailing · climate-responsive facade design
Analysed by Claude Opus. Every score above is a judgment call with its reasoning attached — kindly cross-check this against the official statement on the SIH portal before your team commits to it.