 |
Conditions of entry
Each year the Dutch institutions of higher education whose main subjects are architecture, urban design and/or landscape architecture select their best graduation projects of the past year and submit these to the Archiprix. The selection by the institutions takes place in accordance with the conditions of entry and selection criteria set down by the Archiprix. According to the conditions of entry the institutes concerned could each submit the following number of plans to Archiprix 2004: Delft 9, Amsterdam 4, Eindhoven 4, Rotterdam 3, Tilburg 2, Wageningen 2, Arnhem 1, Groningen 1 and Maastricht 1, giving a maximum of 27 projects. Besides these formal regulations, the conditions of entry contain the following criteria underlying both the selection of plans by the institutes and the adjudication. The quintessential requirements are: that the outcome of the entry is an architectural, urban or landscape design; that this has an explicitly stated issue or issues as its basic premise; and that there is a detailed account of how, working from the above issues, the scheme was arrived at. When judging the plans the following elements are successively taken into account: the analysis of the task; the conceptual strength of the project; the spatial quality of the design together with a sensitive deployment of resources; an account of the plan in words and images; and lastly the cohesion enjoyed by these elements. This cohesion is of major importance as it serves to demonstrate the entrant's mastery of the process insofar as this translates the set task into a three-dimensional solution.
The jury
Each year the Archiprix's executive board assembles a new independent jury of experts. In the interests of fairness, no persons directly connected with preparing a submitted scheme or directly related to a designer of such, may sit on the jury. The jury's task is to assess the submitted plans on their own merits and briefly comment on the substance of each. In addition it has to select the best entries and divide the prize money among them accordingly. There are five members of the jury, four experts in the three disciplines concerned and a theorist. The line-up of the jury who judged the final year projects of Archiprix 2004 is as follows:
- Felix Claus - architecture
- Stefan Gall - urban design
- Berdie Olthof - landscape architecture
- Vincent van Rossem - theory
- Carel Weeber - architecture
Secretary to the jury is Henk van der Veen of Archiprix.
Adjudication
The entries were judged on January 6th and 12th 2004 in Delft. Before those dates the jury received for each scheme a text composed by the designer giving the essence of his or her plan. In the period between the two dates the jury studied the designs and the accompanying texts. It assessed each project on the basis of the criteria established by the Archiprix and stated in the conditions of entry.
GENERAL REMARKS
The institutions teaching design in the Netherlands selected 27 final year projects for inclusion in Archiprix 2004, the full quota for all institutions at this stage. Of the 27 plans 21 were in architecture, one in urban design and five in landscape architecture. The two last-named scores are worth remarking on. From 1999 on, institutions have been obliged to name the specialization or degree subject of the entries they submit. Since that year, the number of urban design projects has never been so low and the number of landscape architecture projects never so high as on this occasion. In the last-named category the quality as well as the number of entries is high. It is especially encouraging to see graduate students drawing land development interventions into the domain of landscape architecture and endowing these with poetic qualities. The jurors are baffled by the presence of just one urban design submission in the current batch of plans. On the architectural front, the fashionable projects colouring previous years are scarcely in evidence this time round. The same can be said of large buildings and complex programmes; on the other hand there is a firm commitment to urban design aspects. Lastly, the jury would like to draw attention to the great differences in quality among the architecture projects. It does seem rather as if the institutions' selections were slightly off target this time. Given the large number of architecture graduates from the universities of technology, one would expect a broad top layer of high-quality plans in this subject area.
|
Prize and special mentions
The jury was unanimous in its verdict that three plans clearly stood out from the rest. All three have been awarded prizes whose order was decided by taking the average of the orders of preference made by the individual jurors.
Hourglass - Mark van Beest
The Inclusive City: An asylum seekers centre in Maastricht - Robert Verrijt
Delta Works 2.0: A park like a dike - Ronald Rietveld
|