The four winning projects of the 2018 Young Talent Architecture Award

The 2018 Young Talent Architecture Award competition has come to a close with today's announcement of the four winners! Out of 40 shortlisted student graduation projects and 12 finalists, the four winners will be recognized during an award ceremony at the Palazzo Mora in Venice on September 20.

The jury praised the winning projects as “complete thorough works. As also seen in the finalist works, the act of architecture is inherently visionary and each project presents a kind of vision of how one would start to work for the future”. They also noted the implicit social and cultural relevance of the submissions. 

“It is extraordinary to discover that during the European Year of Cultural Heritage, the four YTAA Winners have worked with the theme of heritage. Architectural education that includes heritage is essential for the future of Europe and the once heritage-contemporary dichotomy is becoming a powerful heritage-contemporary alliance,” commented Themis Christophidou, Director General of the European Commission.

Check out the winning designs below.

Hendrik Brinkmann, graduate from the College of Architecture, Media and Design (Berlin University of the Arts)
Project: “Neue Bau|akademie Berlin - a club for the former & future architecture”

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. More project info.

Julio Gotor Valcárcel, graduate from the Madrid School of Architecture (Polytechnic University of Madrid)
Project: “Perdido (Lost) - P.R.U.S. of Madrid”

The P.R.U.S of Madrid is the Plan of Recovery of the existing Underground Spaces 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. More project info.

Matthew Gregorowski, graduate from The Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture & Design (London Metropolitan University)
Project: “Deplorable Framework”

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. More project info.

Loed Stolte, graduate from the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment (Delft University of Technology)
Project: “The Bank of England: a dialectical project” 

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. More project info.