Design Vanguard, our annual look at the best emerging architectural practices, is a window into the future, a glimpse of where the profession is heading. This year, two of our 10 winning firms are from Spain (despite the country's damaging recession) with work that demonstrates a powerful materiality, such as Venecia Park by Héctor Fernández Elorza Architects, featured on our cover. Other international winners come from Mexico, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong. We're pleased, as well, to honor four U.S. practices—though young American architects have often had less opportunity to build than some of their foreign peers. With the economy picking up, these domestic designers are coming out of a period of intense experimentation, where they worked on installations, temporary structures, and unbuilt projects. Take Marc Fornes, who calls his Brooklyn firm TheVeryMany: he has been creating astonishing curvy and lacy sculptural forms, digitally designed and fabricated from thousands of computer-cut elements. The Oyler Wu Collaborative, a husband-wife team in Los Angeles, has designed elaborate temporary structures made of woven or criss-crossing lines of polypropylene rope, tubular aluminum, and other industrial materials. The results of such stunning exploratory efforts will surely have an impact on their architecture going forward.
Many of the emerging architects in this issue share common ideas and sensibilities. Like Fornes's work, the projects of Akihisa Hirata of Tokyo allude to nature. But Hirata is equally concerned that contemporary architecture should not be so extreme that it loses “its connection to society. The problem facing my generation is reconstructing that relationship,” he maintains. Hirata's work fosters social interaction, as does an unusual project by Grupo Aranea of Alicante, Spain. For a park in the town of Elche, the principals—he is an architect, she a landscape architect—devised elevated footbridges that curve and flow across a river bed, to knit together two parts of the town.
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