The four winners of the Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) 2018—a competition run by the European Commission, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, the Architects’ Council of Europe, and the European Association for Architectural Education—have been announced. With “implicit social and cultural relevance,” each of the winning projects deals with the theme of heritage in a personal yet visionary manner, leading to a set of projects that “show good architectural citizenry.” In the second edition of the competition, 451 students from 118 schools participated, representing 32 countries from across Europe (with China and South Korea participating as Guest Countries).
Read on to see the four winners with descriptions of their projects provided by the Young Talent Architecture Award.
Neue Bau | akademie Berlin - a club for the former & future architecture / Hendrik Brinkmann, College of Architecture, Media and Design Berlin University of the Arts
The project is a contribution to the contemporary debate on the programmatical and architectural future of the Bauakademie in Berlin. Working on reconstruction means posing a set of questions that make the typical design problems more complex: all decisions need to take into account the existing building which might be long gone but very prominent in mind. The Jury considered that the author sets a rhetorical project with questions to be asked with engagement, implicitly having a social and cultural relevance.
Perdido (Lost) - P.R.U.S. of Madrid / Julio Gotor Valcárcel, Madrid School of Architecture Polytechnic University of Madrid
The purpose of the project is to recover that forgotten and latent landscape converting it to public space. Starting from research, the Plan is developed by recovering the existing spaces, designing a new network of accesses and connecting the urban scenes. The Jury highlighted that the project works with different scales at the same time: urban, infrastructure and the tectonics, through experimentation with the architectural system.
Deplorable Framework / Matthew Gregorowski, The Cass Faculty of Art Architecture & Design London Metropolitan University
The project is a proposal for the holistic reinvention of the British countryside. The formation of a vast new forest recomposes the landscape of the Peak District National Park and the structures within it. As human intervention becomes legible, impressions of nature are emancipated from naive conceptions of beauty. The Jury was attracted by the complexity of the post Brexit situation and how the author deals with a strong concept to reimagine this new situation.
The Bank of England: a dialectical project / Loed Stolte, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment Delft University of Technology
Critically inspired by John Soane’s legendary ‘ruin-esque’ Bank of England, the project explicitly engages the architectural dialectics of ruin and construction, interiority and exteriority with those of genuine publicity and institutional power. The Jury was startled by the originality of this project, an intellectual piece of work which is extremely solid: the ruin, the money, the bank. The drawings are amazing and they are complemented by an incredible piece of writing.
Loed Stolte passed away on December 24, 2017. His family wished to keep his memory alive by participating in the award and disseminating his work. YTAA 2018 is dedicated to his memory.
The YTAA 2018 Jury consisted of:
- Salomon Frausto, Director of Studies at the Berlage, Delft (President)
- Martina Bauer, Architect, Senior Associate at Barkow Leibinger, Berlin
- Ana Betancour, Researcher, Professor and Rector at UMA School of Architecture, Umeå
- Matilde Cassani, Architect on the border between architecture, installation and event design, Milan
- Rainer Mahlamäki, Architect Founder of Lahdelma & Mahlamäki Architects, Helsinki
For more information on the award, check out the website, here.
News via the European Commission, the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, the Architects’ Council of Europe and the European Association for Architectural Education.
