We are very proud of our graduates Vincent François and Iwo Borkowicz who are both on the shortlist of 30 projects for the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016!!
The Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) joins the prestigious European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture: the Mies van der Rohe Award and the Emerging Architect Special Mention. With the addition of the YTAA, this trio of biennial awards from the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and the European Union’s Creative Europe program recognizes the best in European architecture at each stage in an architect’s career. By recognizing the best graduation projects of recent graduates in programs of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design, the YTAA will become an important stepping-stone for young architects – some of them future Emerging Architects and EU-Mies Award winners!
World-Architects’ support of the YTAA extends the platform’s goal of highlighting the best in contemporary architecture to include a new generation of architects: those just out of school and embarking on their careers. By profiling the nominees, the winners, and their projects on World-Architects, young architects will have a place to promote their work and make themselves known to a wider audience.
Check out their projects here:
Iwo Borkowicz
A Symbiotic Relation of Cooperative Social Housing and Dispersed Tourism in Havana Vieja.
Development model and architectural prototypes.
The mission architects have in contemporary society goes beyond making sure we get spatial proportions right, develop innovative artistic concepts or guarantee environmentally and economically efficient building processes. More than ever, architects also need to play a prominent role in the social and political debate on the way we read, plan, design and build the environments we inhabit and play this game at all scales simultaneously. At the same time, the needed architectural innovation needs to start from rethinking different ways of sharing space and from creating novel programmatic adjacencies, as nowadays it seems like separating mechanisms win from inclusive ones, individual aspirations overtake collective strategies of using space and creating monocultures increasingly dominate making heterogeneous environments based on multiplicity.
The project developed by Iwo Borkowicz was embedded in a research project, called Streetscape Territories, that takes the above statements as a point of departure. This research project, offered to the students of the International Master of Architecture as an academic and professional framework to develop their master dissertation, suggests to make architecture starting from rethinking its relation to the streetscape. The research deals with the way architectural artifacts, systems of open spaces, property structures and their inherent accessibility and permeability models configure streetscapes and how their inhabitants can read and give meaning to them. Streetscape Territories focuses on accessibility and models of proximity at different scales and starts from the assumption that urban space, from the domestic scale till the scale of the city, can be understood as a discontinuous collective space (de Solà-Morales, 1992; Avermaete, 2007, Scheerlinck, 2010), containing different levels of shared use that are defined by multiple physical, cultural or territorial boundaries (Habraken, 1998). In this research project, urban space is not considered as unconditionally accessible by all users, as urbanity depends on providing as well as restricting access to territories, this way defining the identity of a place. As a consequence, urban space can not -and should not- be characterized by overall continuity as it responds to mechanisms of providing and denying conditions for privacy or community. These mechanisms employ systems of borders and boundaries (Sennett, 2013) to configure sets of aggregated, integrated or overlapped territories that are read, interpreted and used by its users in multiple ways. The main research question of the project is: how do territories and people relate to each other and how do these relationships contribute to the local identity of the physical and social environment, manifested in its streetscapes?
Iwo Borkowicz’ project, with the title “A Symbiotic Relation of Cooperative Social Housing and Dispersed Tourism in Havana Vieja”, builds further on a VLIR UOS development project in Havana, Cuba (Streetscape Territories, July-August 2015) and refers to the mentioned research question the Streetscape Territories framework proposes. His project addresses this city’s acute problems of housing shortage and increasing poverty by linking this challenge to alternative ways of developing sustainable tourism strategies and by taking advantage of the growing potential of recent emergence of small scale entrepreneurship, empowering its proper citizens. Iwo’s project develops architectural prototypes that combine small scale tourism, social housing and productive activities in Havana’s streetscapes, promoting an alternative urban growth model but simultaneously pronouncing an innovative discourse on spatial configurations, sustainable building processes, renewed craftmanship and materiality in a development context.
– Kris Scheerlinck
Vincent François
Tøyen park – Munch Museum area Oslo
The area around the existing Munch Museum in Oslo, in the vicinity of the ‘Tøyen park’ was for the students the project area for their master dissertation.
With the development of the new Munch Museum in the shadow of the famous opera house of Snøhetta on the shore of the Oslo fjords, the question was asked ‘what is the future of the existing Munch Museum and what is the future of the existing park around this building?’. The area around the existing museum is a multifunctional park. In the summer it is used as a festival site, in the winter as a slide and in autumn and spring it is a serene spot to stroll around with playing children amongst unknown flower species in the shadow of the botanical garden.
What is the future of this place? Will the open area be left for the land speculators and will it therefore become a copy of the failed development on Aker Brygge where the quality of housing is being reduced to a mathematical exercise of profit and even more profit? Rather not!
The answer of project developers is crystal clear. The call for more housing possibilities will be solved in an efficient, speculative manner. Anonymous housing blocks will be provided that not only neutralise the specificity of the place but also let it disappear for good. The nearby centre of Tøyen is a painful example of this.
With this question and this dilemma Vincent François approached the design area in a peculiar way. He didn’t start from a previously determined building programme but rather from a programme where ‘experience’ and ‘temporality’ are central. Temporary installations, inspired by the existing seasonal activities, were accommodated in a sort of ‘toolbox’ and were given a potential accommodation within a visual grid of 5.00 x 5.00 meter, which is functioning as a mental urban room. The intensity of the programme to be developed within this open area around the existing Munch Museum would ensure that the existing open landscape of the Tøyen park (including the existing asphalted car parking) could give a new landscape dynamic to the botanical garden and to the multifunctional challenges of living in the immediate vicinity.
And what about the existing Munch Museum? Vincent François continues the logic of the open area in the existing building. Temporary functions can receive a permanent home here. Thus, the infill with a recycling store, where goods can start a second life, is an example of how this social framework can offer opportunities in a meaningful way to an environment where inhabitants are also searching for new integrated destinations. In this way a potential speculative area becomes an example of a social revaluation. Vincent François was inspired by the story along the historical river ‘Akerselva’, where living, working and education gave an innovative dynamic to this historical axis. It is an example of how a city can reuse historical frameworks in a contemporary context.
The ‘genius loci’ is no longer a visual story, it is a social challenge where architecture has to fulfil a serving role with respect to a multicultural society.
The story of the existing Munch Museum becomes in this way a story of a supporting place, where various cultures can write a new Norwegian story.
-Raf De Saeger