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Winners Architecture
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Winners Architecture

Sophie Delhay Architecte

Prize winner

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.

Lina Ghotmeh

Architekturpreis:Lina Ghotmeh ©H. Assouline

Prize winner

“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

Irene Perez i Jaume Mayol_TEd'A©Hisao Suzuki, nominiert

Nominated

“TEd’A arquitectes is a workshop and a studio. TEd’A arquitectes 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. TEd’A Arquitectes belong to the generation of architects that has transcended the binary opposition of modernism versus postmodernism.

Without nostalgia, without self-aggrandizing pathos, the work of TEd’A Arquitectes 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.

 

Rotor Architects

Architekturpreis: Rotor Collective©Rotor

Prize winner

The collective, 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 Rotor has gained over the years in the recycling of components.

ANTONAS Office

Aristide Antonas©Zoe Hatzyannaki, nominiert

Nominated

Antonas is considered internationally to be one of the most intellectually experienced players in the current debate on culture-critical theory development in today’s fragile Europe.

A major challenge in current discussions about architecture and cities is critical confrontation with the increasingly stronger neo-liberal occupation mechanisms in Europe. Aristide Antonas, Greek Architect and Philosopher, was one of the first people to examine this complex situation actively and ask about the potential, for instance by focusing on specific issues of social housing or the privatisation of public spaces in Greece. 

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