The French architect Sophie Delhay, 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.
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. Therefore the Schelling Architecture Award 2022 goes to Sophie Delhay, Paris.
LaCol Cooperativa are something like the new masters of cooperative housing construction in Barcelona. They are organized as a cooperative and working group. LaCol have played a decisive role in shaping the Barcelona housing construction panorama in recent years and in their own way have had a changing influence, not to say a bit revolutionizing it.
The La Borda project is based on five principles in the creation and use process: autopromoción or self-promotion and direct participation of all partners, the lease of use, the promotion of community life and the strengthening of relationships between the residents, sustainability in view on energy consumption, size of the apartments and lack of parking spaces and finally affordability, in which the cooperative is also an alternative for low-income earners.
The collective undoubtedly contributes to making a metropolis like Barcelona, where rents are constantly rising due to speculative pressure and access to affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult, more livable.
The young Leipzig architectural practice SummaCumFemmer has been made up of the two founders and spouses Florian Summa and Anne Femmer since 2015. The oeuvre they have built so far is still small, but it has caused quite a stir.
Together with Juliane Greb, they built a very remarkable residential building in the Munich district of Riem, which can be interpreted as a signpost for future affordable and sustainable inner-city living for everyone.
“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.
TEd’A Arquitectes nominated for the Schelling Architecture Award 2020
“The mallorquine practice TEd’A is a workshop and a studio. They propose to move forward by looking back, without losing sight of the past and tradition; to continue to perfect tradition as an indisputable heritage; to defend regional identities against totalizing uniformity. We prefer evolution to revolution.”
The position and work of TEd’A Arquitectes stands out to mark a cultural position against naïve technophilia. The office has a theoretical base and a body or work that substantiates their approach. The mallorquine practice belong to the generation of architects that has transcended the binary opposition of modernism versus postmodernism.
Without nostalgia, without self-aggrandizing pathos, their work shows how respectful syntheses of contexts are possible everywhere. Standing in line with similar architects who preceded them. TEd’A Arquitectes offer an approach that understands their presence and actions as simultaneously specific in time and opportunities as well as general and transcendent.
