The Winners: Competition Competition 2011

Architizer News

The Winners: Competition Competition 2011

February 28, 2011

Wearing the Woven Gown: Fashion Museum on Omotesando Street, one of the three winners, Narine Gyulkhasyan & Anahit Hayrapetyan, Yerevan, Armenia.

We know many of you have been waiting with bated breath for this announcement, so we’ll keep this short and sweet in the name of expediency. Today we’re happy to announce the winners of the Competition Competition 2011. The three winners and three honorable mentions represent the very best of the hundreds of “losing” competition entries submitted from around the globe.

The Jury met last week at Relative Space NYC, and included John Beckmann (Founder of Axis Mundi), Felix Burrichter (the Editor/Creative Director of PIN-UP Magazine), Olympia Kazi (theExecutive Director of the Van Alen Institute), Jing Liu (Founder of SO-IL), Dung Ngo (Senior Editor of Rizzoli International Publications), and Nanako Umemoto (Founder, Reiser+Umemoto RUR Architecture PC).

Van Alen Institute Director Olympia Kazi summed up the “meta” element of the brief quite well, saying:

“During our jury on Tuesday I found extremely interesting the experience of passing from one entry to the next and realizing that often what we were actually judging was as much the specific design entry as the competition brief to which it had responded! Often a design solution can be as interesting as the framework to which it responds. I found that the most interesting entries were the ones that re-thought the brief to which they were responding and were successful in creating their own coherent framework. These entries are much stronger as stand-alone exercises and for that reason emerged in this uniquely meta-competition of competitions.”

Kazi gets to the core motive behind the competition — to reexamine the very notion of the competition, and to recognize the “losing” projects that may have transcended the briefs they originally responded to.

SO-IL founder Jing Liu also notes the topicality of the brief, underlining the importance of criticality and self-awareness in the dialog on emerging architectural practice: “It puts a smile on my face whenever I see that behind the meticulous line works and the smooth effects of the renderings, there is a critical mind trying to communicate something larger than merely answering the bullet points. If architecture is in crisis, which it always is, this should be the only mode of operation. Being it a recycling plant or pig houses.”

Without further ado, here they are – the winners of Competition Competition 2011:

Winners

PIGHOUSE, Alexander Prusakov and John Lim, New York, United States.

Felix Burrichter: “A beautifully presented project that manages to provoke discussion on many levels: sustainability, urban renewal, religious conflict, as well as local and global politics.”

Dung Ngo: “What stood out about this entry is the low-tech but high-touch and high-impact factors in terms of idea, context, and presentation. You can practically smell the project!”

Chicago Institute for Land Generation, Stewart Hicks, Allison Newmeyer, Urbana, United States.

Felix Burrichter: “A politically interesting response to a problem that many cities are confronted with in the face of 21st century real-estate speculation.”

Dung Ngo: “A provocative programming proposal that would have tremendous impact on the very ground architecture is built on.”