ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition

About the competition

The ASCE Sustainable Solutions Competition challenges students to develop a stronger understanding of sustainability and learn to incorporate sustainable solutions into everyday problems that engineers may encounter. Students are encouraged to be creative in their solutions and use all resources available.

2025 Topic

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of ASCE (the City) and many private companies implemented flexible workplace policies, allowing employees to work in hybrid and remote settings. This shift has resulted in office building occupancy averaging less than 25% of pre-pandemic levels, affecting the ability and willingness of commercial offices to sustain their previous levels of investment and returns. In response, The City has formed a public-private partnership (PPP) to acquire a parcel with a 5-story commercial office building for mixed-use redevelopment. The City has adopted the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure’s Envision framework to achieve its sustainability goals and will use it as a key assessment tool for this project.

Rules and RFIs

The rules of this competition are intended to simulate a request for proposal (RFP) that responds to a real-world challenge. The purpose of this rules document is to provide students with a proposal scenario, existing conditions, and goals that should be achieved in proposal submissions. The guidelines are intentionally general and encourage teams to rely on creativity to achieve all planning and design elements. Student teams should read these rules thoroughly and seek clarifications as necessary.

The competition provides a “Requests for Information (RFI)” period so that student teams can ask questions about the rules as needed. See the rules document for how and when to send RFIs as well as how to access the responses.

If you have any questions about the Sustainable Solutions competition, please contact us at [email protected].

View the 2025 rules (PDF)

View Rules Appendix A – Existing Site Drawing (PDF)

Intent & Eligibility Acknowledgement Form