Archiprix International 2009 Announces Winning Projects

Archiprix International 2009 recently announced the winners of the world’s best architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture graduation projects.

The international jury convened in Montevideo, Uruguay and reviewed 218 submissions from 66 countries, nominated 24 finalists, and selected 8 winners. The jury comprised Salvador Schelotto (Dean farq, UdelaR, Uruguay), Mario Schjetnan (Mexico), Anne Lacaton (France), Juan Herreros (Spain), Sou Fujimoto (Japan).

The following eight winners were selected to receive the Hunter Douglas Awards (in no particular order):

MArchitecture
Stacking pencil buildings by using MA
by Ryo Kitazawa
Tokai University, Department of Architecture and Building Engineering - Kanagawa, Japan

In Tokyo, the relationships of urban buildings are complex and various. I surveyed them with a view to slotting them into a new building system. Through my research, I found particular space, which I called ‘urban MA’, between slender buildings in Tokyo. Such buildings are called ‘pencil buildings’ in Japan: middle-rise buildings with maximum volume on a small footprint, built in high-density areas. ‘Urban MA’ gives us a sense of proper distance and generates interaction between us. ‘MA’ is a concept peculiar to Japan, based on the refined sensitivity of the Japanese. It is different from ‘void’ or ‘empty’. Taking the research results, I concluded that the essential elements of ‘urban MA’ are the openings on the dense façade. I propose MArchitecture, instead of Architecture, by means of the insertion of ‘urban MA’. By stacking the pencil buildings, ‘urban MA’, which had been two-dimensional, is transformed into a three-dimensional structure. And a multilayered window facing this place makes the area of perception and interaction more complex. The exterior space that connects pencil buildings is full of diverse ‘urban MA’. And this space will form communities to provide space for socializing. This will generate a wide range of activities and attract many people to the area. The interior enables people to sense the presence of others, yet help maintain an appropriate feeling of distance between one another at all the times by adjusting the layered openings. The circulation becomes much complicated on going through the pencil buildings, and enables the people to move around as if strolling about through a city. MArchitecture harmonizes with the finely honed sensitivity of the Japanese and uses it to its full extent. This prototype can be adapted to different building types.

Regional Museum of Mine Site: North of Chile
Abandoned mines and their imprint on the territory
by Tomás García de la Huerta
Universidad del Desarollo, Arquitectura - Santiago, Chile

The project involves the ‘Transito’ mine, approximately 12 kilometres from Tierra Amarilla and 20 km from Copiapó. Explored by the English in the period 1743-48, the mine has remained redundant since then. It is the only mine in the location that maintains itself in a good state, with a colonial house (former administration building) that accommodates machinery within, and solid steel mine cart structures and tunnels. These, in perfect state, communicate through the subfloor with the ‘Andacollo’ mine seven-hundred metres from there. Given its importance as a cultural landscape, the Universidad de Atacama in conjunction with the Municipality of Tierra Amarilla launched a preservation programme to convert the ‘Tránsito’ mine into the first Mining Museum in Chile. The face itself is situated under eight kilometres of tunnels more than three hundred years old that reach a depth of five hundred metres: a distance equivalent to a one-hundred-and-seventy storey building, or the same as the altitude between Santiago and sea level, in other words, a real skyscraper in extension. This fact makes the abandoned mines an extremely potential panorama in terms of commercial/tourism exploitation in the north of Chile. The project, through two spot interventions, generates a circuit of tunnels, an ‘access’ building and an ‘exit’ one – one as the main building in the ‘Tránsito’ mine and the other in the ‘Andacollo’ mine as a mine extension centre. By uncovering a plate-like building, the main building in the ‘Tránsito’ mine connects 2 existing structures: the house and the main tunnel. This is resolved through spatial materialization of the only two directions of the mineralized vein. As they cross, they reveal themselves as the organizing axes of the building.

Deviational Space
Relying on the architect to reinvent dynamism
by Espen Folgerø
Bergen School of Architecture - BAS, - Bergen, Norway

Completely rebuilt after the bombing of WWII, Kristiansund city centre is the clear result of an overall approach aiming to regulate everything in detail. The result is necessarily a closed form: once the gameboard has been filled, the pieces are fixed and everything becomes a static system. The problem, however, is not what Pedersen (the masterplanner) formulated back then, the problem is how we read the city today. The plan is so good that the approach still seems to echo in the minds of everybody working with the city. Every city forms a system, and every system produces deviations. The potential for development and community building does exist, but we need to change our approach in order to find it. We need to move off the map and into the territory itself. We need to find a new approach suited to coping with the challenges of our time, so that the city can reacquire its dynamic properties. When facing a society dictated by economic forces, architects often react by reducing themselves to mere instruments of these capital forces, a facilitator of their immediate needs. Here, the architect has an important role in structuring society. Doing so demands a clear definition of this role clearly for oneself and others. The architect, above all others, has the possibility to visualize and comment upon the ongoing debate, becoming part of the process, interacting with both developers and users. The success of every architectural project aiming to contribute to the building of societies depends on the ability of the project to combine pragmatism and idealism.

09_deeply rooted tree
Architecture School in Velluters Old Town, project in 3 scales: urban, project, process
by Pasqual Herrero Vicent
Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura - Valencia, Spain

It all started one afternoon, when I decided to go to the site, an old quarter in the heart of Valencia. The site contains the essence of the project, you can walk in the streets and sense the past with its ambience of craftsmanship…sounds, smells, people, situations. Could we recover this atmosphere with the project, restoring the life and the branding of all these urban layers to the quarter? This is the story of a deeply rooted tree, growing in the soil in the middle of a missing Old Monastery site. It is about recovering craft activities inside and generating new spaces for the city on the outside. It is about a tree grown from this soil, creating a crafts cave…one big space underground to be freely realized. The light is softly filtered by perforated concrete wells, where you feel safe in your world. The tree appears on the surface, taking its substance from the earth, rising and giving interstices to the city. It takes its shape while adapting to the urban context, protecting an inner green court. It is an aerial tree, empty inside, a continuous topographical space. It consists of essential concrete and wood architecture, working with light, materials, shadows, movement. It is a place to learn, talk, read. The bark is broken into fragments, presenting a variably full and empty skin to cope with the sun, wind, time. On the inside, the skin is made of recycled beams of wood that disappear between the tree trunks in the square. The Tree is a school of architecture, a place to learn to work with craftsmen, artists, citizens.

Tokyo Littoral Art Center
A proposal for floating art facilities
by Kazuaki Hattori
University of Tokyo, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Engineering - Tokyo, Japan

The illegal occupation of retired ships, seen in various places along the Sumida River, which is situated on the city edge – unlike rivers in European cities – still prevents us from the possibility of designing an amenity on a riverside. One day I found a beautiful lumberyard ruin at the mouth of Sumida River. Lumberyards on the water are often unnecessarily reclaimed, causing the setback of the coastline of Tokyo Bay. The ruin can be easily converted to moorings – in other words, parking places for ships. This idea solves both problems. By gathering together retired barges, ships for water transportation, we can also use these vessels as facilities for exhibition space and for studios for artists. Barges have large holds and, as such are mobile rooms. They can bring upstream many activities based in this art centre. The Sumida River itself will resemble a temporary museum.

Metropolitan Markets
The Shanghai MetroMarket Network
by Matthew Murphy
University of Edinburgh, Dept of Architecture - Edinburgh, Scotland

A cycling businessman is startled by a mother hen and her chicks as they file across the path. His bike veers into shards of glass that litter the cycle route. As he phones his office he is approached by a ragged entrepreneur. Barefoot, with tattered clothing, he carries a basin for water, rubber patches and a small tube of adhesive. A kerbside transaction occurs and the businessman continues on his way: the global economy of a booming Megacity meets the Artisan Entrepreneur of Shanghai. This project demonstrates that Shanghai is at its most fascinating when these economies meet. The MetroMarket Network is designed to facilitate this uniquely Shanghai-based mode of modernization, using a ticketless platform principle. The tradition of specialized market trading, the last vestige of the ragged entrepreneur, is incorporated into the infrastructure of the Megacity.
Two station designs have been made to test this proposal through an alteration of ongoing developments. The underground/ above ground relationship is reconfigured, as the produce of the marketplace seeps into surrounding structures and communities The Shanghai Bird Tower is a proposal for the Hong Kong New World Tower and Huang Pi Nan Road Metro Station. The tower and station are currently under construction with direct access proposed between the tower lobby and the metro station. The proposal adopts this project after the primary structure has been erected (core, columns and floor slabs). The Shanghai Bird Tower is powered by a Bird Market at ground level and a Bird Zoo at the apex of the building. Avian Logic infiltrates the rest of building as new programmes nestle throughout the tower. The Earthen Flower Box is a proposal for the Zhen Ping Road Metro Station, reusing the excavated soil as a by-product of the civil engineering project. An allotment ziggurat facilitates floral production for the MetroMarket while operating as a counterweight to the cantilevered roof, providing partial cover while ensuring that the subterranean marketplace can breathe.

MAJA TURG: a market for Tallinn
Preserving the market hall structure in a new formula
by Max Rink
Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture - Delft, Netherlands

Since Estonia’s independence in 1991 there has been a radical shift towards the neoliberal economy. Of course there is also a counterside to this, and even institutions like the Tallinn Urban Planning office are also facing a harsher climate. City development is dictated by individual real estate agents seeking profit, resulting in difficulties in implementing any sort of masterplan or strategy. Loss and internalization of public space into shopping mall interiors is the consequence. I focused on a zone west of the old town where two neighbouring forces of commercialization and neglect come to terms with each other. Amid this border zone lies the ‘Russian’ market behind the station. It functions as a gateway between the city centre and the area beyond. The market is an important factor in Tallinn public life but due to its marginal character and the upgrading of the surroundings, it is likely to vanish in its current form.
The aim of the project is to investigate the potential of the market as an attractor of supplementary functions. The design challenge lies in the successful integration of the typology of the outdoor market and its ‘public character’ with an additional programme to form a 3-D fabric without lapsing into the simulated public environment of the mall. The search for form and organization brought me to the model of a sponge. To translate this model into a workable architecture I use the following strategy: a hypothetical matrix of slabs in three perpendicular directions forms a conglomerate, which are carved out to create the spaces desired while leaving enough body to keep it stable. I propose an organizational structure within which ownership/inhabitation remains negotiable. Public passages for the market are bordered by niches that individuals can occupy; a narrow bazaar-like route with spaces for rent on a monthly basis encircle community-run market halls, offering an architecture that agitates through scale and absence of perfection, but is lively and tactile through materialization and usage.

Markerpark
The final plan for the Markermeer
by Sander Lap
Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urban Design, - Rotterdam, Netherlands

The flood of 1917 launched the biggest land reclamation project ever realized in the Netherlands. The Markerwaard was one of the Zuiderzee projects involved. Construction began in 1942 but the German occupation brought this to a halt. Successful protests to a restart resulted in a paradox. The half-finished land reclamation, which was meant to be a recreation and natural area, has become a dying eco-system. It is remarkable that nothing has been done about the damaged Markermeer site, knowing that it would be relatively simple to recover it. By digging trenches in the bottom of the lake and lengthening the water edges, gradients would be created and floating deposits would sink, resulting in clean water. Sand from the trenches could be used for coastal reinforcement, nature, housing and recreation. The clean water strategy would result in a ring of archipelagos: the Marker Atoll, consisting of the existing archipelago of IJburg, the island of Marken, the Marker reef, the Westvaarders islands, the bay of Lelystad and the Enkhuizerzand. An ‘icon of euphoria’ could celebrate a thousand years of creating land from marsh. This 400-metre hill would be a monument of landscape engineering to explain to all Japanese, American and Chinese tourists how Dutch people constructed their country. The reef is a laboratory to avoid erosion and to generate eco-power. The bay of Lelystad could provide a marina for boats, floating houses and outside the harbour, a monastery. The Enkhuizerzand islands would be an oasis of still water in the rough water of the lake. This oasis would work as a kidney to clean the water and function as a nursery for the flora and fauna of the park. On the barrier itself, metropolitans would have their gardens in which to relax.

Images: Archiprix