There are few planners who have such a broad base and focus on the big picture as Lola Landscape Architects from Rotterdam. In addition to employing landscape architects, architects and urban designers, they also collaborate with a large number of partners. They conduct research, for example in the large dike project that resulted in the book “Dutch Dikes” and not only mapped and systematized all the dikes in the Netherlands, but also showed how this greatest Dutch invention is likely to play an increasingly important role in the future. This resulted, for example, in plans for a future-proof port of Rotterdam, even with rising water levels. Lola was founded in 2006 and works mainly in the Netherlands and its neighboring countries and in China.
Many of its projects involve the transformation of disused industrial sites or large sports facilities, which, along with parks, is one of the drivers of urban redevelopment.
The Schelling Architecture Award 2022 goes to Sophie Delhay, Paris. The French architect, who founded her own office in Paris in 2008, has become a leading figure in the renewal of urban housing in just a few years.
In her search for a socially relevant architecture, Delhay is almost exclusively concerned with all possible forms of multi-storey housing – an area of construction that seems to offer only minimal freedom across Europe because it is bogged down in the constraints of global real estate financing and land speculation. Starting point for her designs is always specific research into the way of life of future residents.
Sophie Delhay understands her preoccupation with the grievances of today’s housing construction as a very personal, socio-political choice. For her, making suggestions as an architect as to how housing construction can be brought out of its impasse means changing society.
“If you are building today, it is of vital importance to understand that you necessarily always find yourself in a system of relationships”. This is the credo of the architect Lina Ghotmeh, who speaks out in this debate with committed statements, with her buildings and in the context of her teaching. After working with Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel, she taught at the École Spéciale, the most conceptual of the Paris architecture schools shaped by Paul Virilio.
Ghotmeh grew up in Beirut, where she studied at the American University. She was shaped by the time in Lebanon shortly after the civil war. In her methodology as an architect, she advocates an “archeology of the future” as precisely as possible as the starting point for every project. She understands this to mean analyzing what already exists, checking it for its – even painful – meanings + then relinking these with the social and political reality of life on site. Ghotmeh combines this translation service with a strong architectural concept.
The Belgian collective Rotor, founded in 2005, is working on redesigning the use of materials in architecture and construction. It is often said that the great task of architecture in future is no longer in new construction, but in rebuilding and continuing construction. But what exactly does that mean and what consequences would this analysis have for the architectural discipline? No one has tested it so broadly and intensively in recent years as Rotor. As the name implies, it’s about cycles, specifically material cycles. Together with a lawyer they have developed a “Vademecum for the reuse of building materials”. The guide combines a close examination of the legal framework with the practical experience that the collective has gained over the years in the recycling of components.
With their comprehensive body of work Inge Vinck, Jan De Vylder and Jo Taillieu have challenged assumed wisdom about architecture in a short period of time. Their architecture challenges the expectations of the observers, the way we see buildings and the reinterpretation of materials. The incomplete nature of their buildings is the result of a process that aims to remain open to improvisation as long as possible.
