The Media Architecture Biennale Student Awards recognize the world’s best student projects at the intersection of architecture, urban design and planning, media and interaction design, and urban media art.
For the 2023 edition of the Biennale in Toronto, Canada, awards were given out in six categories: Animated Media Architecture, Spatial Media Art, Future Trends and Prototypes, Equitable and Sustainable Media Architecture, Participatory Media Architecture and Infrastructures, Transmedial Media Architecture, and Beyond Commercial Media Architecture.
Each winner received a customized digital award created by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Design + Technology LAB.
Animated Media Architecture
Projects in this category demonstrate creative integration and use of light sources on building façades. They add to the communicative capacity of a building and to the experience of the building, the broader site, and the surrounding public space.
Winner: CABINET OF INFINITY
Project Leads: Faezeh Mansourkhaki and Zeinab Rahimi, Bauhaus University Weimar
“Our team was tasked with a project to create an interactive installation that would showcase the art collections of the Museen im Schloss Friedenstein Gotha in Germany. The primary aim was to inspire people to visit the museum by presenting the artworks in an innovative and engaging way. To achieve this goal, we designed a pavilion that combined the decorative elements of baroque architecture with modern technology.”
Runners Up: THE MOTION CURTAIN, Blue Box
Spatial Media Art
Projects produced at the intersection of architecture and media art. These projects add compelling layers of meaning to places to activate, challenge, and shape public spaces in innovative, artistic ways.
Winner: Ghostbox
Project Lead: Cagdas Cecen, University of Applied Arts Vienna
“Ghostbox is a work of audiovisual experience within a constructed environment. It attempts to investigate the “Observer Effect” in the real world. The action occurs in a dark space filled with ten constantly-powered, audio-modulated, red laser modules. While the lasers are physically identical, the audio information they carry differs. This creates an entangled, amorphous audiovisual scape, lending it a patterned structure. Although the system appears uniform, it reveals its synthesized nature upon interaction.”
Runners Up: Lifesphere, The hole
Future Trends and Prototypes
Projects in this category shed light on what the future of media architecture might look like. They experiment with new technologies, production methods, or ideas. Projects in this category can be both actual projects or conceptual and speculative.
Winner: Speculative Hybrids
Project Lead: Panagiota Pouliou, Aalborg University Copenhagen
“In Speculative Hybrids we employ machine learning algorithms in order to generate 3D conceptual architectural forms with respect to site-specific regulations. More specifically, Generative Adversarial Networks are implemented to generate annotated point clouds. The iterative power of such a tool facilitates the design process by suggesting a plausible array of satisfactory outcomes in space-problem structuring, and can assist in the formulation of more efficient problem-solving processes.“
Runners Up: Melt Remelt, Aura
Equitable and Sustainable Media Architecture
Media architecture can be used to reflect upon or address inequities and injustices related to society and/or climate. Projects in this category consider aspects of environmental and/or social justice in their ideation, design, implementation, construction, or programming.
Winner: IsoChronic City
Project Leads: Prakriti Srimal, Shuyao Li, Siyang Zheng, Sonali Bordia, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
“IsoChronic City is an urban response to the recent predicament of what the process of reurbanization in cities will entail in the post-pandemic era. The project utilises datasets interpreted by machine learning algorithms along with spatial computational methods to create urban environments influenced by notions of proximity and walkability within fifteen minutes.”
Runners Up: losing control, Pure Power/Daily Combat Strategy for Water Collect
Participatory Media Architecture and Infrastructures
Projects in this category aim to engage with the social and political life of the city and empower citizens to take part in collaborative city-making, especially placemaking and placekeeping. They can be digital, physical, or hybrid projects such as community platforms encouraging exchanges between citizens for the purposes of civic engagement or the management of urban infrastructures and shared resources.
Winner: Occupy Bus Stops
Project Artist: Meral Şentürk, Yildiz Technical University
“Occupy Bus Stops tries to lessen the gap between individuals and digital public spaces. The project endeavors to invite and encourage individuals to play an active role in the design of basic organizational structures and surroundings. By doing so, the project is believed to contribute to the elevation of personal consciousness and revisit the alternative ways of creating social consciousness in urban societies.”
Runners Up: Digital Waves, The PlayScape
Transmedial Media Architecture
Media architecture can engage and explore relationships with broader forms of media and technology such as social media, film, television, artificial intelligence, AR, and VR. Projects in this category explore aesthetic, technical, and social interplay amongst architecture and media (and media as architecture/architecture as media) in order to express and shape the ways we design and experience reality.
Winner: Wrinkles
Project Lead: Daisy Ziyan Zhang, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“This project starts with the simplest yet most difficult task - observation. Through gazing at the minute details of the everyday, the growth of patina, the ritualistic cleaning, the easily obliviated people and events, this project uses “wrinkles” as a conceptual thread to contemplate on the correlation between a building’s life cycle and the life cycles of the humans who inhabit it, embarking on a journey of wonder, introspection, and reimagination.”
Runners Up: Box Body, Alter.ii
Beyond Commercial Media Architecture
Some of the best examples of media architecture creatively integrate commercial interests with civic goals and/or artistic vision. Projects in this category use media architecture to strengthen a brand while serving more than commercial purposes.
Winner: Cabinets of Mischief
Project Leads: Katarina Bankovic and Katharina Fuchs, Bauhaus University Weimar
“Analogous to the mapping of memories and brain paths, our project aims to map out stories and historic paths of Gotha and Baroque. It references the gameplays of both exploration and classic puzzle games and recontextualizes them in the form of three pavilions strategically placed inside the city. Interactivity is vital, and we invite onlookers to connect their memories to those of Gotha. In other words, our cabinets mimic the experience of a person watching a movie, TV show, or theatre play, in which the emotional connection allows the spectator to relate to the 'text' and remember it without effort.”
Runners Up: Doppel, Transformative Drift
The awards were adjudicated by a 11-member jury from academia and industry:
MAB Student Awards Jury
Sebastian Meier, Fachhochschule Postdam
Waldemar Jenek, Hochschule Bochum
Cheryl Catterall, Moment Factory
Jeff Schnabel, Portland State University
Valentin Spieß, iArt
Jason Bruges, Jason Bruges Studio
Andreas Lykke-Olesen, Kollision
Daniel Iregui, iregular.io
Refik Anadol, Refik Anadol
Melissa Mongiat, daily tous les jour
Juan Carlos Carvajal B., City Lab Berlin (Student Awards Chair)
