In the nineteenth century France had the Prix de Rome, today the Netherlands has Archiprix. That may be a somewhat forced comparison but nonetheless there is an important similarity: the chosen architects acquire a reputation even before their professional careers have got properly under way. A valuable kick start indeed for young entrepreneurs hoping to make their mark in the architectural field. This year’s Archiprix produced two winners. Five of the remaining accepted nominees received special mentions.

Archiprix has become an established element of the Dutch government’s architectural policy. The practice of spotlighting a number of promising graduates started in 1980 when an official at the Ministry of Housing saw in it an appealing hobby and managed to secure the necessary funds. These days Archiprix is substantially financed through the Ministry of Culture’s four-yearly plans for the arts. Each year the various teaching institutions – the two architectural faculties of Delft and Eindhoven Universities of Technology, six Architectural Academies and the Wageningen Agricultural University – can nominate a carefully assigned number of graduation schemes. An independent jury then examines and assesses the schemes and of course decides which should be awarded the prize.

The Netherlands also has its Prix de Rome, but this four-yearly prize is thoroughly overshadowed in importance by Archiprix. A few years ago Adri Duivesteijn suggested following the French example in awarding the winners of the Prix de Rome a major state commission. But as it happens, the intricate web of clients and the subtle enhancement of reputations that Archiprix brings with it allows it to achieve a similar goal. A look at the list of winners since 1980 reveals a surprising number of names of currently acclaimed architects with flourishing practices. Thus Archiprix appears to be functioning well in the Dutch culture industry, which has the character of a ‘public system’ whose aim is to serve clients in the market and the institutional world in seeking out young talent.

On Saturday 16 May urbanist Richard Koek announced on behalf of the jury, the result of this year’s Archiprix. Alongside Koek the jury consisted of Dirk van den Heuvel (theory), Francine Houben (architecture), Jurjen van der Meer (architecture) and Christian Zalm (landscape architecture). As always the adjudicating body felt compelled to express a few general observations. Considering that the schemes that have surfaced have already passed through umpteen filters, this places considerable demands on inductive reasoning. But the temptation to discover ‘trends’ is evidently impossible to resist.

The Archiprix jury is disappointed by the paltry number of urban-planning and landscape architecture submissions. Wageningen, for instance, failed to submit even one nomination, whereas last year proved a bumper year in that area. Is this purely coincidental or does it point to a particular market trend? Although the jury does not have the answer, it does ‘express alarm’ at this state of affairs.

There was certainly a definite tendency to be detected in the poorly developed relationship between the built object and the site, even in the architectural schemes. Buildings, it seems, benefit more from their urban or landscape environment than vice-versa. Could it be that Koolhaas’s ‘fuck context’ has already percolated through to the teaching institutions?
The jury detected five other tendencies, the most notable being the popularity enjoyed by the theme of infrastructure.

However, the jury did not always applaud this trend, for while it sometimes spawned valuable insights, it was often nothing more than a fascination pure and simple, eliciting modish solutions of little relevance. Stations, transferia, airports and other transport systems are still very much with us. In one particular case such acceleration is even underscored by providing a transferium with an equestrian sports centre. Or is this simply a qualifying allusion to the ode to speed already chanted way back in classical times?

In the two first-prize schemes the designers, both of them women, have combined the scope inherent in the infrastructure with a multi-tiered structure of shops, dwellings and offices. Fenna Haakma Wagenaar sees the interlinking of infrastructure and housing as a prerequisite for an anonymous metropolitan lifestyle. Her scheme There goes the neighbourhood sets itself up in polemical opposition to the attempts to create friendly, intimate neighbourhoods even in the Bijlmermeer. Above the metro and railway station in this Amsterdam overspill area she has designed a 300-metre-high, 110-metre-wide horizontal slab out of which rises a 100-metre-high tower. The building incorporates dwellings, offices, shops and hotels.

The other first-prize winner, Jolai van der Vegt, also overlays a composite infrastructure – Amsterdam’s Southern Axis – with a horizontal slab. On the lower levels she has packed in a high density of shops and facilities, creating a New York style vitality. The environment she has realized on the upper levels – given over to dwellings and offices – is redolent of the tranquil ambience of the nearby district of Buitenveldert.

The jury sees Van der Vegt’s scheme as epitomizing a third trend, which they have dubbed ‘the new structuralism’; a comparison prompted by the interchangeability of functions and multifunctionality within a loadbearing structure. I see it as a recycling of Piet Blom’s ‘urban roof’. The difference is that living in a horizontal slab no longer rises above the ‘wonderful unseemly chaos’ which Blom saw as ‘village urbanity’, but above the fast escape routes via metro, train and car, creating a social environment bound neither by place nor by neighbourhood. Henk Bultstra and Jaakko van’t Spijker’s Hyperflat is yet another urban roof with dwellings, whose ‘underworld’ is simply a gigantic car park. And Joost Glissenaar’s design, awarded a special mention, embodies the reverse principle – parking on a (sloping) roof of Rijswijk’s reanimated shopping centre, In De Boogaard.

A fourth trend was the emergence of a more exploratory attitude reflected in a number of schemes. This encompasses certain of the aforementioned, more practically oriented projects, as well as plans with a more poetic or imaginary programme. Floor Moormann’s LOC ARMOR comes under the first category: this takes the form of a rambling route taking in workshops along the Brittany coast, in which not only our visual faculties but all our senses are stimulated by the elements, and where an almost archaic architecture provides an echo of the craggy surroundings. Hans Moor created a ‘twin house’ for the dancer Jacqueline Bonger and the astronaut Wubbo Ockels, both of whom in their own ways defy gravity.

Both schemes were awarded a special mention. But this was not the case with the category that I have chosen to call ‘social condensers’. Some students take on a sociological problem rather than an imaginary programme, resulting in buildings in which asylum seekers, drug addicts or psychiatric patients are helped to resume their place in ‘normal’ society. Faith in the one-dimensional translation of a programme into a building is the fifth trend picked out by the jury.

It feels that the designers are making a typological error in constantly alluding to the monastery. But is that such a mistake? The monastery is an age-old architectural instrument for the refinement of homo sapiens, and served as a model for educational establishments and school buildings, as well as for Le Corbusier’s residential communities. But the programmatic problem defined by social condensers puts the unequivocal relationship between form and function back on the agenda. And in addressing that problem, the current architectural debate only offers unstable relationships. This is why Albert Luijk’s spiral-shaped building for the gradual return of drug addicts to society is criticized as being ‘too literal’.

By contrast, Patrick Meijers’s scheme Working Forces which also gained a special mention, hinges round such unstable relationships. This is a project with a strong whiff of Ben van Berkel about it, reflected not only in the title reminiscent as it is of Mobile Forces, but also in the accompanying explanatory notes, the design method and the result. Dynamic processes determine the building design of this ‘office-hotel’, the computer assuming the leading role in a constantly changing and growing design process.

The designer explains: instead of stemming from a ‘preconceived idea’, there emerges a ‘new architecture’ which is the ‘outcome’ of that process. And yet the folded floor construction we see here is one of the most popular preconceived ideas around today. Indeed, with its recognizable, time-specific inspirational sources, this scheme shows up the dichotomy in today’s architectural debate: for all the lip service paid to unpredictability and dynamics, it would seem that formal and conceptual traditions still have a role to play. And these have tendencies of their own.

Publication of projects and jury report published in:

Henk van der Veen (red./ed.)

Archiprix 1998., De beste studentenplannen/The Best Plans by Dutch Students

Rotterdam, 010 Publishers, 1998, 80 p., Dfl. 39,50, ISBN 9 640 321 4.

http://www.archined.nl/archiprix