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Conditions of entry
Each year the Dutch institutions offering Master's programmes in architecture, urban design and landscape architecture select their best graduation projects and submit them to Archiprix. The institutions make their selection in accordance with the conditions of entry and selection criteria set down by Archiprix. The conditions of entry set a maximum to the number of submitted projects, proportionate to the size of each institution. So for Delft the maximum is 9, for Amsterdam 4, Eindhoven 4, Rotterdam 3, Tilburg 2, Wageningen 2, Arnhem 1, Groningen 1 and Maastricht 1, giving a total of 27 projects. All the institutions submitted their maximum number to Archiprix 2010. Besides these formal regulations, the conditions of entry contain the criteria underlying both the selection of projects by the institutions 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 the cohesion enjoyed by all 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 theorist. The line-up of the jury that judged the final-year projects of Archiprix 2010 is as follows:
- Wim van den Bergh, architecture
- Nanne de Ru, architecture
- Marinke Steenhuis, theory
- Berno Strootman, landscape architecture
- Wouter Veldhuis, urban design
Secretary to the jury is Henk van der Veen of Archiprix.
Adjudication
The entries were judged on February 12th and 18th 2010 in Delft. Before those dates the jury received for each project a text composed by the designer giving the essence of 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.
Statistics
Of the 27 submitted final-year projects 20 were by students majoring in architecture. After a drop in numbers in the previous Archiprix urban design is well-represented this year with four entries plus a fifth that combines it with architecture. Two projects were designed by graduates in landscape architecture. Eight projects are located abroad.
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General remarks
Looking at this edition as a whole, the jury was struck by a number of trends that it feels need addressing.
Preliminary study
The jury saw many worthwhile preliminary studies of convincing content. Regrettably their results, with rare exceptions, failed to fully materialize in the worked-up designs. As a rule, research and design fail to gel. The increasing concentration on research seems to be at the expense of concern for the resulting design. For those entries that gave much thought to research the jury often has to conclude that the design is relatively weak when compared to the preliminary study.
The batch of landscape architecture entries from Wageningen go all out to present the designs as the outcome of scientific research. It seems also as though the theory component gets treated as a compulsory part of the final report, even though the link with the design is unclear. Again, the sources cited often have an obligatory nature. The jury feels that for a design discipline such as landscape architecture it makes more sense to shift emphasis to the design process itself so as to better develop the skills required to make a good spatial design. Knowledge of the repertoire, thinking in conceptual terms, developing an overall perspective and practising design skills are far more important than giving projects an 'academic' underpinning.
Diploma units and efficiency
More and more schools make use of design studios in which a group of students work together on a final-year project. At
times this involves only the preliminary research and getting the individual design briefs set up. At others, the students collaborate closely throughout the entire design process. These diploma units are often established to keep a tighter grasp on the projects' content projects as well as to ensure that the graduation process proceeds smoothly. Yet the jury is forced to conclude that diploma units often result in a less personal design pathway, so that in some cases the mark of the group and the teachers is more important than the student's own development. Add to this the insistence on a common language of visualization (as much for the scale models as for the drawing techniques to be applied) and the individual aspect of the final-year project can disappear entirely.
Improving the world
One trend in evidence among the projects, one that seems to be waxing rather than waning, is that of improving the living conditions of poor people in the Third World. This challenge is taken up with great enthusiasm, commitment and good will. These projects are often difficult to rate in view of the site-specific circumstances. The jury cannot avoid the impression that such projects often have no true solutions to what are major local problems, enabling these to be resolved. So it is encouraging to find two projects in this edition of Archiprix - Indian Star and Urban Tactics - that follow a promising strategy. Both have designers who are participating with local players in looking for solutions. Urban Tactics goes one further. Its designer has ingeniously developed a strategy where intermediary layers are tactically deployed during both planning and execution. Searching for coalitions, she draws in all the relevant players.
Urban design
Of all the projects of Archiprix 2010 five are by students majoring in urban design. This figure is in proportion with the other disciplines. Regrettably the quality of these projects leaves much to be desired, with the exception of Urban Tactics. Taking the urban design entries as a whole, the spatial design is weak and the urbanist as choreographer and designer is all but absent.
Virtuoso design
Something the jury fails to discern anywhere among the entries is the virtuoso design capable of bringing all the relevant players together and uniting them. This may have to do with the shift in attention to the preliminary study. It can also relate to the development in practice that requires designers to be well versed in the complex process of building construction. The entries this time round include examples of this last-named aspect.
Themes
A number of themes assert themselves in this edition of Archiprix. They are listed here with no further assessment of their value. The environment is given key consideration. Housing is heavily represented. Water is popular, with many projects sited along it, including two on the North Sea coast. The increasing concern with reuse sits well with developments in practice.
Lastly, it struck the jury that there is scarcely an entry that fails to mention Le Corbusier...
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Prizes and mentions
From the entries the jury selected three projects for a prize and two for an honourable mention. The winning designs all give a well-rounded response to the self-imposed brief and are distinguished by high quality in all the set criteria. The honourable mentions were awarded to projects with exceptional qualities in some aspects but with shortcomings in others.
Westpoort Thermae, Jeroen Atteveld, AvB Amsterdam, architecture
The Future of an Adaptive Afsluitdijk, Monique Sperling, Wageningen Universiteit, landscape architecture
Refugium: Running at a Standstill. A Hotel in the Limburg Hills, Fleur Muris, AvB Maastricht, architecture
Fugue: A Harmonic Inversion, Paul Verhoeven, AvB Arnhem, architecture
Urban Tactics, Zineb Seghrouchni, TU Eindhoven, urban design
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