Archiprix 2011 Winners Announced

The lobby of the Guggenheim Museum, June 9th, 2011.

Every two years since 2001, Archiprix International has presented the world’s best graduation projects in the fields of architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. The organization held the 2011 awards ceremony on June 9th in New York City’s Guggenheim Museum.

University-level colleges from around the world are invited to take part in Archiprix by selecting and submitting their best graduation projects. The 2011 edition of Archiprix International generated a response of 307 graduation projects from 72 countries, which were then judged in conjunction with MIT’s School of Architectural and Planning, Department of Architecture. Sponsored by Hunter Douglas for over a decade, Archiprix also includes a traveling architectural tour program for more than 200 architects from Europe, Latin America, and Asia. The tour took place in the U.S. for the first time this year, and included visits to landmarks in Boston, New York, and Chicago.

Last week's award ceremony was preceded by lectures by architects Nader Tehrani, head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, and Beijing-born Yung Ho Chang of Atelier FCJZ, who is current chair of the awards jury. At the beginning of his lecture, Tehrani clarified that Office dA, his Boston-based firm with Monica Ponce de Leon, would be dissolved in the next day or so (he deadpanned that his new firm would be called nada). Chang posed some challenges to the architects in the audience, including how to create work that isn’t spectacle, loud, flat, or “dead”. Chang also shared some of his firm’s product design work including jewelry, chinaware, and glassware.

Yung Ho Chang lectured about how to avoid "spectacle" in design.

Nader Tehrani announced that his firm Office dA was in the process of dissolving.

The winners of this year’s Archiprix competition are:

Amsterdam Alphabet by Gijs Adriaansens, submitted by the Eindhoven University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

A Defensive Architecture by Nicholas Adam Szczepaniak, submitted by The University of Westminster, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, London, England

National Apiological Network: An Illustrated History by Craig Johnston, submitted by the University of Strathclyde, Department of Architecture, Glasgow, Scotland

The New 'Non-Standard' by Jonathan Enns, submitted by Princeton University, School of Architecture, Princeton, United States

A Public Bathhouse by Ruann van der Westhuizen, submitted by the University of Pretoria, Faculty of Engineering, Built Environment and Information Technology, Pretoria, South Africa

Spaces, Poetics and Voids by Simone Pizzagalli, submitted by Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Delft, the Netherlands

Urban Upholstery by Molly Hunker and Mira Henry, submitted by the University of California, Department of Architecture and Urban Design, Los Angeles, United States

You are Here by Lorenzo Trompetto, Veronica Rusca, and Maurizio Pizzocro, submitted by the Università di Genova, Facoltà di Architettura, Genoa, Italy