IsArch Awards For Architecture Students 9th Edition _ Competition Results

IsArch Awards for Architecture Students has announced the winners of this year’s 9th edition  competition of academic projects from all over the world.

IsArch awards is a non-profit organization, founded in Barcelona 9 years ago, by a group of architecture students from the Escola Técnica Superior de Barcelona(ETSAB). The idea was to make a call for projects presented in architecture schools all over the world, and give them a second life. 

“Academic projects are born and evolve during a semester, only to be presented and afterwards,  forgotten in students’archives and portfolios.”

The aim of IsArch has been to start a global debate among students and young architects, about the future challenges of architecture and the built environment, by inviting them to participate in a competition with their academic projects. 

The project gallery that is formed every year is extremely diverse and international, and is evaluated by a unique prestigious jury, as well as a public voting process.

This year, the Jury consisted of: 

EVA FRANCH I GILABERT, Director of Architectural Association School of Architecture

DANNY DUONG, Assoc. AIA, Senior Associate at SO – IL.

GONZALO HERRERO DELICADO , Architect and Curator of contemporary architecture and design at the Royal Academy of Arts.

ANNA MERCI, Architect, landscape architect and graphic designer, founder at Anna Merci —Architecture.

JAMES TAYLOR FOSTER, Editor and writer of esseys and reviews, Architectural designer, Maker of exhibitions

Jury Evaluation and public voting showed off the following winners:

1st Prize: Hotel Escala para Navegantes, JORGE HENRÍQUEZ YANES.

My will to participate in the competition of IS arch started with the idea to show my final project, that took place in La Palma, Canary Islands, on an internacional virtual platform like this. I wanted
to take a chance with this competition because I thought it was great oportunity to learn from other colleagues and their way to see architecture.

The project starts as a re-interpretation of the landscape, to how it was originally, a hydro volcano formed from salt water. The building attempts to impact the area of the cliff and bay as little as possible.
The ground floor of the building is of a gauzy appearance, so that air, light and views of the bay pass through it and vice-versa. In this way the ground floor returns views to what they once were, with the incorporation of the new marina in front.

The buildings physical plant facilities are located on the ground floor, along with storage rooms, staircases, lifts and the hotel reception. On the upper floor are located the restaurant wing, kitchen, leisure areas and conference rooms.

 

The residential rooms are placed in a horizontal slice. The third floor houses the hotel guestrooms, as elongated double rooms, with views of the bay beside a south facing patio that protects from the northerly breeze, with a swimming pool at the front and the solar beach.

2nd Prize: Capital for the Collective:  The Labour Miracle, Erik Bean.

Capital for the Collective: The Labour Miracle explores how sea level rise can be harnessed to positively influence the formation and critical engagement of public urban space. A hypothetical narrative, in which the Labour Party of the United Kingdom is pressured to prove their ideological ideas through architecture, is used to critique the relationship between ideological and pragmatic reactions to climate change.

Sea level rise is approached not as a design limitation but rather as a unique opportunity. The Labour Miracle harnesses sea level rise through three architectural strategies: Protect labour through the formation of inhabitable Labour Citadels, Provide new public spaces, and Participate in the development of civic mindedness and altruistic public contribution.

The ISARCH Awards are one of the few international architecture competitions for students or recent graduates to be recognized and share their work. Every year the ISARCH awards put together an exciting and interesting jury, therefore, I was eager to enter my work. I am very pleased to be recognized this year.

 

The point is: people don’t go to libraries. However, they keep coming every weekend to fast food restaurants and clothing stores, although we cannot come up with any logical reason of why one prefers to pay for a bad hamburger instead of reading a book for free. The shopping centre has established itself as a basic pillar of family leisure throughout the world.So, from the procedures of visibility and globalization strategies of large companies, we will take and use them for our own purpose. Small eco-stores and folk-politics are not working. The ‘think global, act local’ implies a withdrawal, but we think global and act global, with the purpose of building a counter-hegemony, a movement that goes beyond the local scale, which puts knowledge in the hands of people and the media so that it can be used and shared. We do not need automatic doors or fingerprint readers, we need a library that can become the town square if the people demand it.

  

I decided to participate in IS ARCH because it is a well-known international competition that offers students a good platform to introduce their projects.

Also, the honourable mentions:

Urban Experiences. Laboratory, Jorge Evolo
The Neighborhood’s Cemetery : Reclaiming Cemeteries inside the city, Tala Shelbayh
Pilgrimage of everyday life, Tzu-Jung Huang,  Chia-Wei Chang, Mu-Hwai Liou
Ashes, Aina Roca
Critical Facadism, Miguel Ruiz-Rivas
Indigenous Pharmacy, Richard Tsang
Hotel Bellevue ,Oscar Binder
Urban Scarifications, Diego Jesús García López
Gather and Reside, Ting Chen, Lisha Chen, Chi-Shan Chen
[Re]coding the city in a festival of time, Viktor Gekker

All the awarded and submitted projects can be found on this link.

See also: “Urban Flows [ human + water ]” designed by Dimitrios Moutafidi and Angelos Sotiriou wins the Gold Medal at ‘INTERARCH 2018’, here!

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