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Saturday, 1 January 2004 | senay
ar+d: Emerging Architecture Awards
ar+d 2004
the world's leading emerging architecture award
The ar+d award for emerging architecture is the biggest and best award for young
architects in the world and gives £10 000 in prize money. Inaugurated in 1999, the
award was conceived by The Architectural Review and d line, the distinguished
Danish architectural design firm. It is now supported by Buro Happold and Grohe
Intended to bring wider international recognition to a talented new generation of
architects and designers, last year the competition attracted more than 700
entries from nearly 60 countries, representing every inhabited continent.
Awards are for built or manufactured work only, and besides buildings, the full
range of design activity, from landscapes and urban spaces to furniture and
cutlery can be submitted.
For more information contact Peter Davey, the Editor at
peter.davey@ebc.emap.com
The Jury for 2004 was Mario Cucinella (MCA, Bologna, Italy), Kevin Daly (Daly Genik, LA, USA), Ryue Nishizawa (Kazuyo Sejima
+ Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, Tokyo, Japan), Gert Wingårdh (Wingårdh Architects, Gothenburg, Sweden), Peter Davey (Editor of
The Architectural Review).
1st: Youth Centre
Architect
PLOT - Julien De Smedt, Bjarke Ingels
Project team
Julien De Smedt, Bjarke Ingels, Henning Stüben, Jørn Jensen, Annette Jensen, Marc Jay, Nina Ter-Borch
Amager is the big, often rather messy island in the Copenhagen complex. It is where traffic from the bridge over the Sound to Sweden arrives in Denmark. Østamager (East Amager) is a strange area in which run-down industry is mixed with thriving sailing clubs, the latest of which is the maritime youth centre on Sundby harbour.
In the haphazard tatterdemalion surroundings of sheds and abandoned industrial buildings, the new centre stands out as an organized oasis. It is not so much a building as a landscape, a wooden one that undulates between harbour and Sound. Since Foreign Office Architects completed their pier in Yokohama (AR January 2003), such artificial landscapes have become common on the drawing boards of students and young architects, but few of them are based on anything more than fashion and delight in being able to manipulate non-Euclidean geometry. At Østamager, there are reasons for the strategy. The ground is heavily polluted with heavy metals, and the cost of excavating the site and removing the toxic material would have been beyond the means of the client (the Copenhagen Commune), so the architects decided to cover the plot with a 2100m2 deck. Its undulations both shelter dinghies and provide an eventful play surface.
Two separate single-storey buildings are enfolded by the deck. The L-shaped eastern one has social facilities such as the sailing club room and a general purpose space complete with a kitchen. In the opposite corner of the rectangular wooden landscape is a block that contains workshops, locker rooms and boat hall. Both buildings have vertical glass walls through which they are entered, but their other faces are formed of curving, sloping wood over which the users run, sit and play. Clearly, there is a danger that people involved in energetic activities could fall off the roof down the glass cliffs. To avoid this, balustrades top the potentially dangerous places; they are one of the most successful parts of the whole design, with widely-spaced thin stainless-steel balusters joined by stainless-steel mesh. In some countries, and in other hands, the balustrades could have been extremely visually heavy and the death of the project, but at Sundby, the metal rails are not obtrusive and from some angles they almost disappear. Not all the details are so felicitous, for instance detailing of the vertical walls is a bit clumsy in places, but it has to be remembered that this project (part of the commune's Østamager improvement project) had to be created on a small budget so it was necessary to use off-the-shelf components.
The jury was most impressed by the architects' imaginative response to limited resources and their ingenious command of new geometries.
2nd: Chapel
Architect
Daniel Bonilla Arquitectos, Bogota
Project team
Daniel Bonilla, Akira Kita, Ana Lucía Cano
Daniel Bonilla has a talent for expanding churches. In AR December 2002, he won an ar+d high commendation for his Los Nogales school chapel, where the walls swung back to allow a large congregation to assemble on the lawn outside and take part in the service within the building. His chapel of Porciúncula de la Milagrosa at La Calera in Columbia uses something of the same strategy, and I suspected that the same architect was at work, but (apart from me) the jury was entirely different this year from the 2002 one, so there was no question of favouritism.
The new building is on a hillside meadow in the forest; the chapel is in effect perched on a grassy platform that looks through a frieze of trees to magnificent views. Coming up the slope, you arrive at a wall made of thin flat slabs of dark local stone. In a slot in the wall is the brass church bell and through the slot is the southern courtyard of the church (what Bonilla calls the 'confession patio'). The southern wall of the church on the other side of the court is of glass shaded by a pattern of closely-spaced thin timber slats. Entering the church, the point of the slats is immediately apparent: light is filtered and striated and, as the sun moves, it transforms the whole space with slowly changing streaks and sheets of luminance, sometimes stained by the panels of blue and yellow glass incorporated in the skin. Further modification can be achieved by opening the shutter-like panels that carry an inner layer of slats.
The altar is at the north end of the plan, enclosed by planes of stone at each side, which are made like the bell wall of the courtyard. Behind the altar is a further wall that is cut by a vertical slot that reveals the tall dark stone volume of the tabernacle. Gloom is relieved by a long horizontal slot in the north wall and, from the nave, vertical and horizontal slots define a magic rectangle through which the forest can be seen - God's creation is brought right into the middle of humanity's. All this is fairly conventional, if finely honed, but the chapel is capable of remarkable transformations. The whole glass, steel and timber nave can be slid back over the southern patio to the wall with the bell in it. This almost doubles the capacity of the nave and creates two large openings, east and west, that
reveal meadow and forest. At the same time, the ceiling of the box, like its sides, is shown to be glass and slats, providing another dimension of striated light. On festival days, the opened chapel can adopt yet another configuration. A congregation can assemble outside on the sloping meadow to the west of the building, sitting either on chairs or on the ground to see proceedings at the altar, which on such occasions is moved from its normal position and placed between the openings in the walls created by moving the nave, which becomes a kind of transept. (All furniture is light but strong, so that it can be moved readily to change configurations.) The external congregation on these occasions sees the altar in front of the eastern tree frieze that defines a notional space that is both open and partly enclosed.
All members of the jury were much impressed by the ingenious handling of site, space and materiality that has created a memorable and numinous place.
3rd : Winery
Architect
Architecture Workshop
Project team
Christopher Kelly, James Fenton, Tim Hervey, Steven Waterman, Adam Thornton, Gareth Alley, Russel Lund
Structural engineer
Dunning Thornton
Otago in New Zealand is the most southerly wine-growing region in the world (and so one of the coolest). In the middle of the dramatic scenery of the Southern Alps, it has a continental climate, with hot dry summers and crisp winters, schist based soil and a strong tradition of viticulture, which has now partly taken over from sheep farming. It is ideal for growing Pinot Noir grapes, and some of its vineyards have produced internationally recognized wines.
The Peregrine Winery is one of these. On the terraced floor of the Gibbston Valley, below the often snow-capped mountains, the site is bounded to the north by the Kawerau Gorge, one of the most dramatic moments in a remarkable part of the country. In contrast, the winery is calm, smooth, ordered. In Edmund Burke's terms, it is an island of human-made beauty in the middle of the natural sublime landscape. Rows of vines in carefully ordered vineyards spread out over the valley from the central building, which is itself a clearly organized diagram of the processes involved in wine-making.
The process and the building are both linear. And the whole string of events is contained under a long curving translucent roof that both unites the stages in wine production and becomes a shining emblem of the place. Visitors approach from the south, and are introduced down a ramp to the final stage in the production process. You can taste the products in the barrel room where the wine is stored before despatch, a 40m long modern version of the traditional viticultural cave, in which oak barrels stretch into the distance. After this introduction, visitors are encouraged to stroll on the terraced roof, where views of the Kawerau Gorge are framed under the translucent canopy floating overhead. It is made of deeply corrugated composite glass-fibre sheeting supported on galvanized purlins, which themselves bear on propped frames made of universal beams with their webs drilled out. This 140m long roof is not just a picturesque feature: it obviates the need to allow for snow loads on the building below, and removes most of the solar heat gain from the production rooms, where stable temperatures are important. Digging the barrel room and the internal fermenter chamber into the ground also aids temperature control. An external fermentation area extends to the east of the main linear route under separate canopies, and at the junction of the two axes is the workpad, where grapes and barrels are manipulated.
But in the end, the building did not earn its award for careful organization of the production process (though that was obviously not unimportant). The huge, calm gently curving silvery canopy floating over the massive base, all set among the orderly vineyards, makes an irresistible and poetic vision of civilization amid wild nature, and the jury was unanimously convinced by it.
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