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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 Archiprix. The institutions make their selection in accordance with the conditions of entry and selection criteria set down by Archiprix. According to the conditions of entry the institutes concerned could each submit the following number of projects to Archiprix 2007: 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. Archiprix received 26 entries, as Maastricht declined to submit a project this year. Besides these formal regulations, the conditions of entry contain the criteria underlying both the selection of projects 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 project was arrived at. When judging the projects the following elements are successively taken into account: the analysis of the brief; the project's conceptual strength; the spatial quality of the design together with a sensitive deployment of resources; an account of the project 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 Archiprix's executive board assembles a new independent jury of experts. In the interests of fairness, no persons directly connected with preparing a submitted project or directly related to a designer of such, may sit on the jury. The jury's task is to assess the projects 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 2007 is as follows:
- Ruurd Gietema - urban design
- Sylvia Karres - landscape architecture
- Madeleine Maaskant - architecture
- Koen Ottenheym - theory
- Herman Zeinstra - architecture
Secretary to the jury is Henk van der Veen of Archiprix.
Adjudication
The entries were judged on February 19th and 23rd in Delft. Before those dates the jury received for each project a text composed by the designer giving the essence or his or her entry. The jury studied these written explanations in the period between the two judging sessions. It assessed each project individually in terms of its qualities, proceeding from the criteria established by Archiprix and stated in the conditions of entry.
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GENERAL REMARKS
Statistics
The institutions teaching design in the Netherlands selected 26 final-year projects for inclusion in Archiprix 2007. Of the 26 projects 21 were in architecture, one in urban design and four in landscape architecture. This year has seen a surge of interest in the rural component, with more than a quarter of the entries concentrating on rural sites. Nine projects are located abroad. The number of female participants is back up to a third, having sunk since 2001 to only 16 per cent of entrants last year.
Tendencies
Taken as a whole, this year's entries exhibit a number of more general tendencies that the jury feels need drawing attention to. In view of the current focus on the environment and energy it is remarkable that there is so little interest in environmental and ecological issues. This is a subject deserving full attention at the schools in question and yet the architecture projects in this batch of Archiprix entries include no such relevant tasks.
As for presentation, the jury concludes that this is almost exclusively of an exceptionally high quality in visual terms but that the content is by no means always as accessible as it should be. Indeed, it is not unusual for the answers to the questions posed by the brief to be lacking in the presentation altogether.
Of great concern to the jury this year is the mediocre quality of public space design. Attention to this aspect is way below par, not least as the number of urban design entries has dwindled to one.
A most encouraging sign by contrast is that ultra-contextual designing is back. The new generation seems to be focusing more on attuning the architectural design to a specific site, thereby distancing itself from the ubiquitous 'fuck context' approach of recent years.
Landscape architecture is well represented in this batch with positive, relevant projects. Regrettably though, all entries in this field fail to attain a high spatial quality.
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Prizes
From this year's entries the jury selected seven whose quality they consider to be superior, honouring them with two first prizes, two second prizes and three special mentions. All seven are strong architecturally and the winners score high on all criteria as well as achieving their objective in convincing fashion. In the case of the four prizewinning projects, the principal aspects of the brief possess outstanding qualities. The three special mentions score high on a number of criteria but lack the consistency of the winning projects.
The Work of the Tekton, A garden house in Heeswijk - Jochem Heijmans
Maja Turg: a market for Tallinn - Max Rink
Osdorp Rings - Francisco Adão da Fonseca
SmART, Sarajevo Museum Of Art - Sasha Radenovic
Boerengoed! - Ivonne de Nood
Terrain vague, entropy poetry and nothingness - Francesco Marullo
Terschelling Theatre Route: three implanted structures for landscape display - Marjolijn Guldemond
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