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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 2005: 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 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 brief; 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 entire process insofar as this translates the issue raised by the brief into an appropriate 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 cultural philosopher. The line-up of the jury that judged the final-year projects of Archiprix 2005 is as follows:
- Juliëtte Bekkering - architecture
- Marie Hélène Cornips - cultural philosophy
- Aglaée Degros - urban design
- Frits van Dongen - architecture
- Maike van Stiphout - landscape architecture
Secretary to the jury is Henk van der Veen of Archiprix.
Adjudication
The entries were judged on January 13th and 18th 2005 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. The jury studied these written explanations in the period between the two judging sessions. It assessed each project on the basis of the criteria established by the Archiprix and stated in the conditions of entry.
GENERAL REMARKS
Statistics
The institutions teaching design in the Netherlands selected 27 final-year projects for inclusion in Archiprix 2005, the full quota for all institutions at this stage. Of the 27 plans 24 were in architecture, one in urban design and two in landscape architecture.
In this year's batch Amsterdam has proved a popular choice for final-year projects, eight being sited in the Dutch capital. Seven projects are located abroad, three just across the border and four in more distant parts. This does little to change the average number of foreign sites in the past few years.
The percentage of female participants has dropped from over 30% in the years around the turn of the millennium to 20% in 2005, which is way below the 50% reached by female students in earlier years.
Urban design goes AWOL
Of the three final-year subjects architecture is way ahead of the pack, almost entirely dominating this year's Archiprix entries. Landscape architecture and urban design are very poorly represented. Nor is the problem just one of quantity. At the macro level the quality of designs is below average too. In view of last year's bumper crop of landscape architecture plans this year's drop in numbers is probably an isolated incident. In the case of urbanism by contrast it seems to be part of a downward trend. Not that this year's only urban design entry is down on quality; what worries the jury most is that there is little regard for urban design generally. In many architecture plans whose objectives impact on the urban context, this component has been left completely unresolved. Some even bypass the notion of urban design entirely. This may surface in the fact that the potentials of the ground plane as a framework for integrating the building with its urban context are insufficiently acknowledged and exploited. Not so the winning projects, which have been impeccably inserted into their setting.
Relationship between research and design
A striking number of projects have an extensive and well thought-through run-up phase. The written reports include preparatory studies and analyses often of a high quality. Though these elicit compelling assignments, key aspects tend to get overlooked at the development stage. In many cases, the relation of research to design leaves much to be desired. An important consideration when judging a project is that of internal consistency. The design should be a logical, well-considered spatial response to the set problem. Unfortunately this is by no means always the case.
Superstructures
This year's crop of Archiprix plans exhibits a tendency towards megalomania. Many projects present a large carcass or support structure that can be variously filled in. This is all the more remarkable in view of the fact that some of these designs fail to adequately resolve the issue raised in the brief. Clearly, infrastructures of such flexible potential present problems in that they are difficult to pin down architecturally.
Commitment to the present
It is encouraging to see final-year students engaging on current and socially relevant briefs. The popularity of socially troubled West Amsterdam as a location for graduation projects speaks volumes in that respect. There are in addition a number of projects that take up the cudgels against the trend towards gated communities and the like. These seek new solutions for private public transitions that encourage interaction between the two domains rather than separation. Lastly, there are two projects which focus on the cultural diversity of the Netherlands with designs that successfully blaze new trails in uniting the different cultural backgrounds.
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Prizes
From this year's entries the jury selected three whose work they considered to be of superior quality, honouring them with two prizes and a special mention. All three projects are well underpinned architecturally and score high on all criteria as well as achieving their objective in a convincing fashion. In the case of the two prizewinners the principal aspects of the brief possess outstanding qualities.
Islamic Cemetery, Amsterdam - Furkan Köse
HHN Low Cost Carrier Terminal - Theo Reitsema
Concrete Poetry, an underground club on top of the North-South Line - Petra van de Ven
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