At the end of May this year, the embankment of Lake Neuchâtel in the Swiss city of the same name resembled the Babylonian pandemonium. More than 100 teams of Europan winners and finalists, as well as representatives from 62 project sites from 19 countries, have gathered here to combine eating fondue with summing up the results of the tenth session of this architectural competition.
A few words about what Europan is. It is a federation of European national organizations that has been holding a series of competitions for 20 years that allow the ideas of young architects and urban planners to become the property of the general public, and cities to find innovative architectural and urban planning solutions. In the course of each session, first a competition of design sites is held, where "bundles" are selected, consisting of the city authorities and the developer, and then the architectural competition itself, in which any architect or city planner under forty years old who has received higher education on the territory of the European continent can take part … The winning teams usually get the opportunity to implement their project, or at least do architectural research for their site.
The Europan Forum in Neuchâtel provided an opportunity to see what is going on in the minds of young architects, “cut” their main ideas and find out how they see the future of European cities.
The Europan 10 theme “Inventing urbanity: regeneration, revitalization, colonization” set three main directions that determined the strategies of projects: firstly, the focus on transforming already existing urban landscapes, their adaptation to new life demands, and secondly, the focus on the revitalization of urban life, the creation of public spaces and, thirdly, a course towards the development of new, not yet urbanized territories in harmony with the existing natural landscape.
Within the framework of these three directions, the participants of the competition developed various ways to solve existing problems, systematizing which, the organizers of Europan created three working groups - "New urban landscapes", "Urban strategies" and "Turning old into new" - within which presentations and discussions took place. projects.
Let's start with Urban Landscapes. The topic of the "pedestrian" city became one of the key issues discussed in this group. The presented projects are such as
The Red Ribbon by Martin Sobota and Thomas Stelmach, or 2100 Meter by Alexander Raab and Philip Heckhausen, offer a new approach to this beloved challenge for European architects. By "stringing" various elements, both architectural and landscape, on the walking route, they tried to connect the city and nature, thus creating a kind of transitional space.
Extensive development of territories is another topic raised in this group. In projects
"Status Quo" by Carolina Ruiz-Valdepenas and Daren Gavira Persard and "The Modern Castle" by Morten Wedelsball, land is no longer a neutral background, but becomes an active resource, establishing new relationships between the natural and cultural layers of the city.
The popular, but rather controversial topic of integrating agricultural and other "production" landscapes into the urban environment was also hotly discussed at the forum. This issue was raised, in particular, in the project "Urban Composition" by Yves Bachmann and Kubota Toshihiro, in which landscapes atypical for a city enrich its environment, blurring its boundaries.
In the working group "Urban Strategies" the problem of collective participation in the creation of the city was discussed. The projects presented in this topic, for example, “Reactivate La Ribera” by Javier and Alia Garcia-Herman, cannot find complete architectural solutions, but they present a development strategy with an “open end” that can respond to possible changes in the requirements for the use of the site.
A number of negotiated project proposals, such as Daniel Cappelletti's Urban Grafting or Lapo Ruffi and Antonio Monachi's Synapsis Colony, raise the issue of urban density. At the same time, density is interpreted as a question not only of the concentration of the built-up mass, but also of its typological and functional diversity, where high density becomes the basis for creating an active urban cultural environment.
Another topic of discussion is fragmentation and urban enclaves. It was considered in projects that “split” the building into pieces and focused on the voids between these fragments as potential public spaces; an example of such a solution is Martin Jankok's work "Dense / Lite".
Finally, about the group “Turning the old into the new”. In it, the discussion was also conducted on three topics, two of which represented different strategies for this "transformation": the first is the "superstructure" of the city, in which new urban elements complement the existing ones, improving their quality and filling the voids, and the second is the renewal of internal spaces of already existing components, and their functional reprogramming establishes new connections between them. Thus, Timur Shabaev and Marco Galasso's project Suture provides an example of creating a continuous urban fabric by gluing it together with new inserts, while in the work of Macro-Micro by Bruno Wanheisebruck and Ameka Fontaine, the renovation of industrial heritage is becoming a major component of the project. Projects on the third theme - “Life - work” - rethink the concepts of land use depending on economic and demographic changes in society and new relationships between work and life outside of it. In accordance with this strategy, in the Proscenium project by Marianna Rentzu, Aleksndros Gerousis and Beth Hughes, the interior space of a residential building becomes a chamber square, combining its various functions.
The debate drowned out, the participants went home to work on projects. Another Europan cycle has begun. The list of new competition sites will be announced in February next year. Unfortunately, we will not find a single Russian city there again - another opportunity will be missed for our integration into the European architectural family, for exposing the problems of our cities to a broad international discussion, for a fruitful exchange of ideas. It remains to be hoped that Russian architects will take an active part in the 11th session of Europan on foreign sites and, perhaps, the name of one of the domestic cities will appear in Europan 12, ready to embody the ideas of young architects.
