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 plans to Archiprix 2006: 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 23 entries. This is the first time in years that the
full quota was not submitted. Delft submitted 7 entries and Rotterdam 2;
Groningen failed to submit its one allotted 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
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 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
2006 is as follows:
* Jan Benthem - architecture
* Hilde de Boer - urban design
* Jacob van Rijs - architecture
* Marieke Timmermans - landscape architecture
* Pieter van Wesemael - theory
Secretary to the jury is Henk van der Veen of Archiprix.
Adjudication
The entries were judged on February 3rd and 7th 2006 in Delft. Before
those dates the jury received for each scheme a text composed by the
designer giving the essence of his or her project. 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.
GENERAL REMARKS
Statistics
The institutions teaching design in the Netherlands selected 23
final-year projects for inclusion in Archiprix 2006, the full quota for
all institutions at this stage. Of the 23 plans 19 were in architecture,
two in urban design and two in landscape architecture. Amsterdam is as
popular as ever as a location, with more than a quarter of the entries
being sited in the Dutch capital. Six projects are located abroad. The
percentage of female participants continues to drop. A full 30 per cent
in the years around the turn of the millennium, it has sunk in 2006 to
16 per cent - and this when the percentage of female students is roughly
double that figure. Each year proportionately fewer female final year
students are getting through to Archiprix.
Tendencies
Taking the entries as a whole, the jury can identify certain general
tendencies. First off, a substantial number of projects relate to
recycling and the past. The jury regards the intention of treating
existing qualities with care as a good thing in itself but recommend
that this concern be more strongly bound up with new technological
solutions than is now the case. This aspect needs working on. In view of
the concern for the existing, it seems odd that the projects show no
profound knowledge of the relevant history. This is another aspect that
could do with some work. Once familiar with the roots of the profession
student designers can build upon existing knowledge and insights,
instead of trying to reinvent the wheel. An aspect conspicuous by its
absence is a revelatory perspective on the future. Entrants' attention
seems to concentrate more on detail than on developing new perspectives.
Various juries in previous years have referred to a slowdown in
development on the urban design front, even going so far as to diagnose
a 'crisis in urban design'. If we now establish that architecture
entries exhibit a lack of future vision one might wonder, somewhat
polemically and provocatively, whether this could be the first sign of a
'crisis in architecture'.
The macro scale of planning is well represented both qualitatively and
quantitatively, with urban design even featuring in entries by
architects. The city-within-a-city is a popular theme. It is in projects
like these that the designers' lack of historical knowledge is most evident.
Perhaps the most crucial observation is that there is often a
regrettable lack of input from other disciplines. This is to the
detriment of the design quality in a number of cases. More
fundamentally, it is of the greatest importance that budding designers
collaborate during their studies with representatives of disciplines key
to the assignment as a way of preparing for professional practice, where
designers often work in 'design teams'. Another criticism is that many
plans are inappropriately worked up. The scale level to which they are
taken is often the wrong one so that the project fails to live up to its
promise. At times this is too low, at others too high. The scale and the
degree of development this requires need to be better tailored to the
issues broached by the task in hand.
2006
Prizes
From this year's entries the jury selected four whose work they
considered to be of superior quality, honouring them with two prizes and
two special mentions. All four 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.
1st prize
Germany's Attic - Seth de Rooij
http://www.archiprix.nl/e/2006/23_zolder_e.html
2nd prize
ZENNEZ Health Spa and Leisure Resort - Jan Hendrik Bos
http://www.archiprix.nl/e/2006/12_ontspanning_e.html
special mentions
Thanks for the flowers - Boris Hocks
http://www.archiprix.nl/e/2006/02_bedankt_e.html
History of a large house - Bas van Vlaenderen
http://www.archiprix.nl/e/2006/04_geschiedenis_e.html