Last week in Madrid, the Archiprix International 2015 was completed with prize winners and an international workshop on the new urban reality in Madrid. If you are interested in the new role of designers and their more activist and political position, this is a must-see. Click here for the workshop results. And here for the prize winners and nominees.
The Archiprix formula has been successful in spreading around. Besides a competition amongst the school in the Netherlands, now also countries such as Portugal, Chili, Spain, Italy, Russia en Turkey have their own annual school contest. This allows students to compare their work beyond their own school environments and teachers and raise standards to a level that matters. It serves as a tool of emancipation for students in (landscape) architecture en urbanism.
I especially hope that someone, a group of recent students preferably, will start such a country competition in the USA. I believe that a North American emancipation of students in between landscape and architecture and in between states and a wide diversity of ideologies and social connections will greatly benefit from that. It takes only one to three selected projects from each school to make a simple formula into an enormous reservoir of talent and comparison. There were some excellent USA candidates in this years edition of the International Archiprix. If you are interested in pursuing this, the Archiprix team can help you. I have seen the young architects from Portugal interviewing people during this event and prepare content for the book that accompanies their new yearly edition. Become connected and see that our field will get into this groove of emancipation and crowd quality. Please contact me if you are keen on doing this in the USA of whatever other country!
The Bi-annual International Archiprix is organized by a collaboration of the Dutch mother-ship and a different country each year. This event serves a global effort to reach every possible school, in this edition a record of 350 schools around the world have participated. And I am happy to notice that this does not lead to a more universal style of design, but instead a surprising differentiated and diversified collection of topics and interests.
And finally, because I want to limit my own words this month in favour of you spending more browsing time in the Archiprix archive here… only one more thing.
The Archiprix formula is partly rich in content because it has a great editorial team for a book and a camera crew for video’s. This is the video that was made to announce the winners of the Dutch Archiprix 2014 edition. The project EMS-full hybrid by Remco van der Togt and Jonas Papenborg has been supervised by me and landscape architect Harro de Jong. The project is part of my research group landscapemachines.com and if you have not really understood what a landscape machine is… this is the best way to be informed. Watch this video – it includes English subs.
yours,
P
paul roncken 