Archiprix arises.

Archiprix Awards are given for the world's best architectural graduation projects. Organized by the Dutch Archiprix Foundation, the international awards have grown out of a scheme initially limited to final-year students in the Netherlands. Archiprix is held every two years, but the awards for 2003 were given this May. (Problems of security in Istanbul, where the jury met in 2003, necessitated relocation of the awards ceremony to Genoa, causing much delay to the programme.)

Aaron Betsky, Director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute, commented that this crop of awards * shows 'students have a suspicious attitude towards building. This is true both in terms of the way in which they eschew a detailed description of construction and in their tendency to shy away from the single, autonomous structure stand[ing] in the landscape.

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'Certainty has no place in student work, and neither does it have ... in a society in which ... built facts only encase and promulgate false order. Students are showing us the way towards an architecture that is able to surf the international waves of information and exchange, and yet can end up in a place and of a place ... just as these students are at the edge between learning and practising, between the projected and the possible, and between the academic and the real, architecture today must be on the edge between shelter and exploration, between recognizable order and experimentation, and between the local and the global.'

Four winners were chosen in this round of awards; they certainly illustrate Betsky's thesis. Yusuke Obuchi of Princeton University, USA, won his award for Wave Garden, an undulating carpet floating on the Pacific off the California coast. It is intended to act as a supplementary power plant, generating electricity from wave action at times of peak demand during the week. But on holidays and at weekends, it will become a public park, taking new forms by drawing electricity from the grid, so the area dedicated to recreation is inversely proportional to the energy consumed. The park, says Obuchi, links 'the ebb and flow of the ocean's waves to the societal wave of fluctuating energy consumption'.

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Thomas Raynaud of the Ecole Speciale d'Architecture in Paris got an award for his WWhub, a proposal intended to organize the projected reclaimed land at Wanchai in Hong Kong by reorganizing the city's infrastructure. A dynamic multi-layered public space is to be generated that projects out to the harbourside, and is capable of continuous modification and adjustment.

Achim Menges of the Architectural Association School in London was honoured for his suggestion for making a prototype for humanizing and urbanizing Westland, the area between Rotterdam and the Hague which is largely covered by glasshouses by the Dutch agricultural industry. The Postagriculture proposal suggests a pneumatic structure with differentiated layers to allow different temperatures and atmospheres to be achieved internally. Menges suggests that not only will his epidermis allow different kinds of crops to be produced, but it will permit agricultural uses to be mixed with leisure activities in a cycle that relates to the seasons.

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Harm Timmermans won an award for his proposal to transform Vierhaven, part of the inner port of Rotterdam which still works and accommodates activities like abattoirs, prostitution and alternative art shows which have been rejected by the more decorous parts of the city. Timmermans adopted a 'strategy of strategic bombing', in which individual areas are transformed programmatically and formally by local interventions that introduce new functions and new buildings calculated to enhance and renew Vierhaven's character, and so set up a network that will reinvigorate the whole area.

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Archiprix International 2005 will be organized in conjunction with the Lighthouse in Glasgow and the city's two architectural schools. P.D

* The jury was Dogan Hasol (chairman), Winka Dubbeldam, Pierre Gautier, Gerard Maccreanor, Natalija Subotincic

ARCHIPRIX BECOMES A TRULY INTERNATIONAL AWARD FOR FINAL YEAR STUDENT THESIS PROJECTS. CUCINELLA GOES ONE TO ONE IN CREMONA. PIANO HONOURED IN OWN COUNTRY AS GENOA MOUNTS MAJOR RETROSPECTIVE. HOPPER FREEZES TIME IN AMERICA. THE AR+D AWARDS 2004: ENTER NOW. VIEW FROM OPORTO.