EUmies Awards Young Talent winners announced at the Venice Architecture Biennale

The Fundació Mies van der Rohe, jointly alongside Creative Europe, has just announced three Young Talent winners of the EU Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Awards category as part of the EUmies Awards Day 2023 in Venice.

Winners received special oak trophies designed by the Architecture School of Kharkiv, Ukraine, before engaging in conversations with members of the European Union, foundation, and jury members N’Goné Fall, Manuel Henriques, Jennifer Mack, Simone Sfriso, and Snežana Vesnić around a four-pronged set of topics that includes ‘Cultural Heritage and Memory,’ ‘Cartographies and Identity,’ ‘New Ecologies within the City,’ and ‘Exchange and Roots.’

Georg Häusler, the Director for Culture, Creativity, and Sport for the European Commission, said the results “show the competitiveness achieved by these young professionals through the amazing transfer of skills from their professors.”

“Young Talent is a key example of the aims of the European Year of Skills, in which these skillful architects and those that will have the opportunity to work with them will be empowered to successfully handle professional challenges and to fully engage in society,” he added.

The three winning projects each received €5,000 and were joined by a parallel Young Talent Open winner. Jury member Fall added: “For us it was important to embrace diversity, to create a group that integrates diversity of ways of thinking, ways of projecting, ways of analyzing reality, ways of transforming reality, ways of learning architecture, ways of understanding architecture."

An exhibition of their work in the Palazzo Mora will remain on view to the public until November 26 as a Collateral Event of the Venice Architecture Biennale, with a special publication set to follow in the fall.

Valter — Dinko Jelecevic from the Faculty of Architecture, Graz University of Technology

Description: "This project deals with the heritage and memory of the place through the insertion of an architectural proposal as an activating layer over its preexistences. As opposed to forgetfulness and contemplation, it proposes civic use; cultural, artistic and educational activity, a new activating and representative narrative layer for all the citizens of Sarajevo. The project stems from a precise understanding of the pre-existence and proposes a delicate and sophisticated intervention that operates through the poetics of light and tectonics, dignifying and bringing life to the place. This project is an excellent example of an architectural intervention on an existing building, on how to treat heritage with respect and delicacy, but being proactive and active. The jury wants to emphasize how this project represents in an excellent way the potential of architecture as a conciliatory tool between the past and the present, illustrating how to move forward."

Peripheral Cartographies — Laura Hurley from the School of Engineering and Architecture (SEFS), University College Cork & Munster Technological University

Description: "This is a brilliant proposal that deals with a very pertinent and contemporary issue of our time: providing the city with a place for the preservation and growth of plant species that nourishes all its green spaces from its heart, without depending on external imports. Eden Archipelago endows the city with self-sufficiency in its regeneration and care of the flora. The jury wishes to emphasize the in-depth research and documentation work on which this project is based and the excellent technical development that has been carried out. The project proposes an open system that revives Buckminster Fuller's architectures, updating them and adapting them to our contemporary times. The jury highlights the optimism and freshness that this proposal brings to our current climate emergency context."

Eden Archipelago — María de la O Molina Pérez-Tomé from the Madrid School of Architecture,  Polytechnic University of Madrid

Description: "This is a project that talks about the exploration in architectural processes that open up and unfold the potentials of what architecture can be. Through cartographic generation, as a method of recognition and identity of a specific place, an architectural system of unfinished artefacts emerges on the landscape that reclaim with their presence the lost memory of the original place. The project is positioned as a political statement and a tool for the decolonisation of the territory. The jury highlights the excellence of this project as an example that illustrates the importance of unrestricted freedom in the explorative and speculative approach to the architectural project in the academic field."

Earth Bound — Shaha Raphael from the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) (Young Talent Open winner)

Description: "The jury wishes to emphasise the high degree of brilliance and maturity that this project exudes in its way of interpreting the territory in which it intervenes, starting out from a profound understanding of the geological landscape and the vernacular construction techniques that define it to create a contemporary and hyper-contextualised proposal at the same time. This project proposes a constructive process and an architecture as a meeting point between the territory and the community of people who inhabit it. It proposes a contemporary way of living outside the urban in harmony with the landscape and in community, and an intelligent application of new technologies at the service of the essence of the place and on a human scale."