EMERGING ARCHITECTURE.

The ar+d awards 2000 received an astonishing number of entries from more than 60 countries. Peter Davey, editor of the AR and chairman of the jury, reports on a very varied and talented input.

The ar+d award was conceived by The Architectural Review and d-line, the distinguished Danish ironmongery firm, [1] to discover and celebrate the work of architects who are not as yet widely recognized: people at the moment in their careers when they first begin to show individual talent (or group of collaborative talents) for making things with confidence and authority.

Often, the award celebrates the critical progression from theoretical, drawn work to built form. We chose the limiting age of 45 because, before that time, it is often very difficult for many architects to express their particular vision: education and apprenticeship is so long, and in the early part of the last decade it was so difficult to get work because of the economic depression.

The 2000 jury was truly international and distinguished, made up of people who are slightly (if indeed at all) older than the age limit for the awards. They are architects who all now have international reputations, but whose work is very different. We had Odile Decq (France), Will Bruder (Arizona, USA), Adalberto Dias (Portugal), Christoph Ingenhoven (Germany), and Erick van Egeraat (the Netherlands). I, a non-practising architect, was chairman.

The jury found it extremely difficult to choose from more than 700 entries which came from over 60 countries. It was a quite astonishing world-wide response. I am very grateful to jury members for thorough, keen and perceptive debates. Discussion was often animated, but there was only one moment when I feared that some of us might come to blows.

In the end, we were unanimous in deciding that the [pound]10 000 prize money should be divided equally between three entries, [2] and that a further 12 should be singled out for high commendation. All these schemes are shown on these pages, as is a selection of others which got through to the last stage of judgement.

Principles

Looking back, I realize that there were underlying principles behind our choices, critical structures only partly articulated by us all at the time of our discussions.

First, we wanted to find courage: to find people who had something new to say, and who were inventively prepared to seek architectural essence.

Second, we were clearly concerned to celebrate honed schemes - those that are most capable of changing the world with least input of resources.

Third, underlying our decisions was a clear concern for appropriate materiality: materials should be used (in whatever new ways) in ways proper to their nature.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, it was clear that the winning and commended schemes had to offer the potential of enhancing human existence. Although very different, all the schemes recognized by the jury show ways of making the world a better place to live in.

Prize-winners

We felt that the three prize-winning entries combined all these characteristics in slightly varying measure. All, without doubt, had courage, all were honed to essence, all were extremely conscious of materiality. But here, there were some differences. Material contrasts between the work of Jae Cha, Shuhei Endo, and Klein Dytham could not be more different. Cha in Bolivia (p42), used conventional materials: simple timber and translucent plastic, which can be bought almost anywhere at a builders' merchant in all but the poorest countries. But, with these, she and the congregation she worked with made a place of great intensity using conventional techniques: screws, saws, hammers and nails. Endo (p44) took a similar conventional material, corrugated metal, but used it with all the powers of the modern Japanese construction industry, in totally new ways to create a memorable and strange result, which makes a remarkable contribution to the landscape traditions of both east and west. Klein Dytham (p46) used an ent irely new material to building: modern balloon fabric, which is assembled in ways that are novel to construction, and made a memorable, if transient, contribution to Tokyo's townscape.

And, of course, each of the winning schemes makes a different contribution to enhancing our existence. The chapel in Bolivia, the pavilion in the Hyogo park and the temporary Tokyo wall touch quite different aspects of our personalities.

Highly commended

The highly commended schemes share the range of invention of the winning ones, and they display a very diverse, but interlaced range of values and expressions. For instance, it is easy, if not facile, to relate the two buildings where an inner building is surrounded by an outer one of wooden slats: Sean Godsell's little holiday house in Victoria, Australia (p50), and the Finnish Embassy in Berlin by VIIVA (p66). But, deeper than the obvious similarities is a concern for modulating interior space and climate with maximum use of ambient energy. In a quite different way, Sauerbruch & Hutton's major contribution to the fabric of Baroque Berlin (p72) is concerned with the same issues. And so are, at a different scale, with different technology and materials, the little buildings by Daniel Dethier (p63) and Rick Joy (p47).

Curiously, several schemes are temporary or subject to change and movement: not just Klein Dytham's Pika Pika Pretzel, but Pierre Thibault's Quebec ice palace (p56), Sam Hecht's water pavilion (p57), Dytham's office meeting place (p62), and Oskar Kaufmann's mobile house (p54.) are all of this kind. Perhaps there is something about transience that brings out edge in design.

Clearly Joao Mendes Ribeiro's stage set (p64) must by its nature be temporary and subject to change and movement, but it exemplifies another factor common to a number of winning and commended schemes: concern with elucidation and explanation. Carl-Viggo Holmebakk's strange mechanism for viewing Norwegian peaks is an obvious example (p70), but Thibault's ice palace, and Hecht's water pavilion also have explicatory functions. And, if you extend the analogy, so does Joy's studio in Arizona, which (among other things) is intended to be a demonstration of how ergonomically appropriate building methods could be reinvented in the US south-west.

In another sense, the student housing at Coimbra in Portugal by the Mateus practice (p58) is an explicatory building. Clearly it is an excellent place for students to live in, and it tells an abstracted story of their lives in the movements of its wooden walls. There are similarities here with the animated facades of both the Berlin Finnish Embassy and Sean Godsell's house.

The award develops

As a jury, we were pleased not only by the number of entries, but by the variety of work we could celebrate: from a massive piece of furniture (Klein Dytham's office meeting place), to a stage set, to a chapel, to Holmebakk's little mysterious monument in the wild, to major urban pieces like the Mateus hostel, and Sauerbruch & Hutton's important contribution to Germany's new capital. Here is a wider range of design and talent than last years. [3] All the entries shown here, and more, will be exhibited at the RIBA in London between 1 and 21 December, after which the exhibition will travel. [4]

The award is annual. Details of next year's event will be published shortly in the magazine and on our website www.arplusd.com. We hope that entries will be as imaginative, varied and full of invention as they have been this year. P.D.

(1.) Their agents are: Keeler Hardware Pty. Ltd, Australia; Vola Vertriebs GmbH, Austria; Elames Builder's Hardware, Bahrain; MCH modern comfort home nv, Belgium; Carl Fa-s, Denmark; TAMSALEOY, Finland; Euxos Diffusion S.A., France; HIGH TECH vertriebs GmbH, Germany; EXPO Ltd. Greece; Tung Fat Ho Building Material Limited, Hong Kong, Aseta ehf, Iceland; d line [TM] india pvt ltd, India; Architectural Hardware Ltd, ireland; d line [TM] italia srl, Italy; Sugatsune Kogyo Co Ltd, Japan; M. H. Alshaya Co. W.L.L., Kuwait; ABS Marketing Sdn. Bhd, Malaysia; AXA Stenman Holland B.v., Netherlands; Dizain interior as, Norway; Khimji Ramdas, Oman; Hamburg International Sales Corp., Philippines; Philman Commercial, Inc., Philippines; Carvalho, Batista & Ca, Sa, Portual; Jamco Trading & Cont., Qatar; Architectural Building Supplies Pte. Ltd, Singapore; MODUL BESLAG Kungsbacka AB, Sweden; Beseblage U.S.W., Switzerland; Hakon Company Ltd, Thailand; Haroon Company W.L.L., United Arab Emirates; Allgood Holdings Ltd, United Ki ngdom; Handrail Design Ltd, United Kingdom; d line [TM] ukltd, United Kingdom; Norup/Clark Inc., United States of America 

(2.) Each winner receives a third of the [pound]10 000, and a special trophy by Knud Holscher, who designs all d-line products.

(3.) see AR December 1999.

(4.) The exhibition was shown at the Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen during November.