Archiprix -- a runway for young architects.

Hans Van Dijk traces the evolution of the major competition for young Dutch architects, now expanding internationally.

Compared to many countries, the Netherlands seems a paradise for young architects. Over the past 20 years especially, they have had a good deal of support setting up in professional practice; at the same time there has been plenty of work for local authorities and national government.

The work was generated in the first place by the regeneration of nineteenth-century urban neighbourhoods, and later by the promotion of architecture to a highly valued cultural activity. Local authorities could present themselves as champions of a 'civilization offensive' against the mediocrity and uninspired professionalism of established offices. After a short period during which star architects such as Alvaro Siza and Ricardo Bofill were flown in, the rising Dutch generation made it clear that they too had the required creativity and expertise. Even when housing was increasingly handed over to the free market and the whims of consumerism, there was still a good deal of work on public buildings.

Over these 20 years, national cultural policy, which had previously concentrated on the visual and performing arts, has increasingly focused on architecture. A special report on architectural policy was adopted by Parliament in 1991. This established stable government funding for institutions including the Netherlands Architectural Institute (which houses archives, stages exhibitions and events and publishes books and the magazine Archis); the foundation Architectuur Lokaal (Local Architecture), which began by providing guidance for inexperienced clients in the public sector, later extending its services to private developers; and funding bodies handing out grants to individual architects, urbanists and landscape designers. Recent graduates in the Netherlands can obtain a starting-subsidy if their work is of sufficient quality, by submitting 20 slides with a written explanation to a committee of experts. The subsidy amounts to a modest year's income -- about [pound]10,000.

This is the architectural landscape that, over the past 20 years, the Archiprix competition has also been helping to shape. Every year since 1980, the various teaching institutions -- the two architectural faculties of Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology, six Architectural Academies and the Agricultural university in Wageningen (which runs a course in landscape architecture) -- have nominated graduation schemes to be assessed by an independent jury for prizes and special mentions.

During the two decades of its existence the enterprise has inevitably changed in character. It had its beginnings in the mid-1970s, when the Ministry of Housing countered public criticism of the monotony of public housing by setting up a Steering Committee for Experimental Housing, with funds to subsidize the surplus costs of innovative and unusual projects. The committee was confronted with experimental student projects which, although not immediately realizable, deserved wider recognition. In response, a 'National Committee for Student Projects' was set up. From the beginning, students sent in projects that were indeed socially relevant, but not always immediately viable. Early juries, during the 1980s, welcomed such projects, while ruthlessly criticizing entries that consisted merely of reports of the participation processes of housing committees. It took the view that architecture was supposed to add cultural value, to social housing as much as any other form of building.

Over the years, juries became steadily more interested in original projects that no longer closely adhered to government housing policy. It was hardly a coincidence that in 1983 financial support was withdrawn, although the Committee for Student Projects still emphasized that projects submitted should be relevant to 'housing and the residential environment'. Later, the contest was opened to student projects of every kind.

From being an outdated and rejected relic of the 'old policy' of the Ministry of Housing, the competition sought and found recognition within the Ministry of Culture's emerging new policy of stimulating the quality of architecture in general. The prize obtained structural financial support, it was steered by a new foundation -- called Archiprix -- and the practice of publishing student projects in rotation in the Dutch architectural magazines (Archis, de Architect, A/B, Bouw) was abandoned in favour of an independently edited and comprehensive annual catalogue.

Today, Archiprix is a mature annual event in the Netherlands' cultural calendar, but it still raises some interesting questions about the competition process and the relation of established architects to the rising generation.

There has often been a divergence between the expectations of judges and entrants. Archiprix is a kind of coming-out ball for its entrants. Unable to show off any realized buildings, participants try to doll themselves up, make themselves as attractive as possible. They present themselves in what they consider their Sunday best: beautiful models and drawings and sometimes quasi-poetic and oracular written explanations. All this has tended to irritate juries, which have mostly been composed of architects of the 1968 generation, looking for a mix of instant pragmatics and ideological engagement.

A deeper question concerns the cultural importance of Archiprix. How accurately does it detect emerging tendencies in the rising generation? When the prizes have been handed out and the travelling exhibition has set off on its tour of the various architecture schools, one asks oneself what has actually been judged: the students' projects, the tutors who steered those students through their diplomas, the school committees that nominated them for Archiprix, or, finally, the multi-disciplinary jury? In short: who judges whom?

It is one of the explicit goals of the Archiprix foundation to stimulate debate on the quality of contemporary architectural education in the Netherlands, and tutors and institutions also feel they are being judged. Every year the jury takes it upon itself to criticize the whole condition of architectural education. The jury, of course, is selected from outside the circuit of academic practice, and its members perhaps temper the luxury of independence with frustration at being without direct influence in academia.

The final selection of student projects for the Archiprix is not a representative sample of what is going on below the surface. It is difficult to be sure whether the final selection really shows the trends among the generation of students, or those among school tutors, or the contemporary expectations of the juries, or the critics -- or is it all of these factors together? -- and if so, is it a whimsical expression of today's delusions or a true reflection of the stimulating energy that radiates from Rem Koolhaas, Ben van Berkel and other Dutch, architects who are successful in both building and theorizing? It is perhaps impossible to unravel this Gordian knot of influences and expectations, but it is just this complexity that has made Archiprix so intriguing a barometer of the Dutch architectural climate.

For the winners, at least, the prize has a real practical value. There is of course a danger that when a student wins a prize, obtains a mention or even a nomination it can create an instant reputation, before he or she has even embarked on the hard task of everyday practice, which could lead to disappointments and frustrations afterwards. Still, many of the prize-winners who presented projects for urban renewal in the early 1980s have gone on to earn excellent reputations in professional and creative practice. The Mecanoo Office, Erick van Egeraat, Dolf Dobbelaar, Paul de Vroom and Henk Engel are all Archiprix prize-winners who have subsequently set up their own successful practices.

Themes have changed over the years. In the early 1980s there were many projects for social housing. The emphasis shifted in the mid-1980s to buildings with cultural and public functions: theatres, museums, sports complexes. Instead of cosy, low-rent substitute houses in old neighbourhoods, there were high-rise apartment buildings. Rem Koolhaas's 'metropolitanism', and ideologically (quasi?) neutral realism became the vogue. Dutch students, mostly educated in a tradition of Modernism and radicalized by the student movement, became interested in Russian Constructivism. Later, new themes entered the stage. In 1989 there were many variations on 'the house'. A year later, the concept of 'travelling' became predominant. Then, in 1992, the two tendencies merged to form a hybrid in the image of the 'metropolitan nomad' -- from the high-income company executive to the poor and homeless.

Archiprix juries have often criticized the bulk of entries for failing to address current practice and emerging social and planning problems. In many cases they have been perceptive enough to discern an existential dimension to conceptual and poetic proposals. But a severe tone predominates. The 2000 jury criticized a whole new generation for paying: 'no attention to spatial development, detailing and construction'. They added: 'We look for spatial virtuosity, not for an extensive spatial analysis.' Nevertheless, it rewarded the best projects. Jaco Woltjer, educated in the Technical University in Delft, won first prize for his project for a library along the Amstel River in Amsterdam, intended to be built entirely of wood and brick, to create an atmosphere of rest and contemplation.

Archiprix is now expanding its reach to Europe. It is hoped that the initiative will be as successful as the evolution of the France-based PAN (Programme d'Architecture Nouvelle) into the European-based Europan. A workshop is being planned for summer 2001 in the famous Van Nelle Factory in Rotterdam -- an icon of Modernist industrial architecture from 1931, now being adapted to other uses. With students, tutors and architects from all over Europe being invited, it is certain to be a stimulating meeting.