What would a Museum of Emotions look like? Buildner announces competition winners for its second year

Buildner has announced the winners of its Museum of Emotions/Edition #2 competition. Participants were tasked with exploring the relationship between emotions and architecture and the extent to which the latter can be used to instigate the former in a building context through the development of a museum with juxtaposed positive and negative halls. 

Buildner assembled an international jury that included Killa Design’s Tommaso Calistri, HMC Architects principal James Krueger, Parisian architect Françoise N’Thépé, and six others to judge the slate of text-free entries, which all also left designers with the leeway to explore their own definitions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in a real of imagined corresponding space.

The results can be seen below. 

1st Prize Winner + Buildner Student Award - Plan B (Egypt) 
Project by: Hassan Mohamed, Fayrouz Khalid, Youssef Mohamed, Marium Hesham (Helwan University)

Jury summary: "The proposal slices through a mountain to offer a tunnel-like sequence of spaces, one that is geometrically complex yet rendered simple through the project’s clear sections. The white mass of the museum emerges from a mountainside as if a foreign object, in stark contrast to the surrounding rocky brown environment. The dialectical dialogue with nature is continued in the two exhibition areas, with one set in a dark space of extreme tension where visitors stand beneath a heavy boulder seemingly lodged in the mountainside, about to break loose; the other is set in a daylight-filled space opening up to a green paradise complete with lush trees, grass and water. This is a project that successfully plays with spatial compression, light and darkness to elicit emotional response." Read their interview here.

2nd Prize Winner - The Buddhas of Bamiyan (Australia)
By: Je Yen Tan

Jury summary: "The author proposes a monolithic black form, dark within, and punctured, split or broken at various moments to let in the sun, yielding zones of brightness. The block-form is sited in the shadow of historical ruins, the site of human construction and destruction. The project is a museum shaped by and organized around considerations of these opposing human forces. The stones used to build the original memorial are put on display within the museum, and emotion is drawn out of a visitor by considering their A) absence from the original monument and B) exhibited in their raw and deconstructed form." Read Je Yan's interview here.

3rd Prize Winner + Buildner Sustainability Award - Roots and Crowns (Australia)
By: James Li

Jury summary: "Within a clearing of an existing organic forest, a monument is proposed. This is organized as a circular grassy mound around a formal grid of trees, the trees puncturing this hill from a foundational space below, without touching it. The project considers heaviness versus lightness, the natural versus the constructed, and dark versus light. The author has designed a calm space focused on natural materials. It is an outdoor place for meandering and observing." Read James' interview here.

Learn more about the competition results and honorable mentions here.