- What is so important competition Is Europan for you - and your team, if you've been there four times?
- This time we took part in this competition for the first time as DROM. The team, in addition to three partners - Timur Karimullin, Sofia Kutsenko and me, also included artist Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva and urbanist Christina Knauf. Participation in Europan is a kind of test for us: where we are in the current coordinate system, are we able to give answers to the questions on the agenda. We can say that so far it is working out.
This competition has retained its high reputation for many years, and it is prestigious to win in it. And, of course, I am attracted by the opportunity to carry out my project.
What do you think is the reason for your great success in this competition - three wins out of four attempts?
- All three of my victories were in the Netherlands, and I think the reason is that the Dutch project approach and the way of thinking in general are very close to me. In the previous Europan session, Timur Karimullin and I made a project for a site in the Belgian city of Charleroi, but, probably, our project turned out to be too radical by local standards, so we did not win then.
What did participation and victories in Europan give you?
- The most important thing is that we managed to bring the Europan 10 project in Emmen - with which I won for the first time - to implementation [details about this project and its implementation can be read here - approx. Archi.ru]. Still, it is a great success when a young architect from Russia, at that time a yesterday's student, has the opportunity to build a project in the Netherlands. And the result, in my opinion, turned out to be worthy. With the help of Europan, I also expanded my circle of contacts, and we continue to be friends with some of the winners to this day.
Tell us about the essence of the new project, which brought you your third victory: why did you choose this particular site, what caused the proposed solution?
- I have long been interested in Baymer - Amsterdam district with an interesting history, and when I saw that one of the Europan 14 sections was located there, I wanted to work on it. I am glad that my partners agreed with me.
Built in the late 1960s on the principles of the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM) for the Amsterdam middle class, Bylmer quickly turned into a criminal ghetto, primarily due to the wave of migration from Suriname - after this former Latin American colony of the Netherlands gained independence. In the 1980s, it became obvious that these problems urgently needed to be addressed, and discussions began among the professional community about how to improve the area's health. On the one hand, there were ideas to demolish high-rise buildings and replace them with new houses. OMA took the opposite position, and in
In their 1986 project, they proposed to preserve the existing development, to compact it and saturate the ground level with a variety of new programs. But, in the end, after the notorious disaster of 1992, when a Turkish Airlines plane crashed into one of the eleven-story buildings, the demolition of the area still began.
H-Buurt, Europan 14, is located on the southern edge of Bilemer. Unlike the territories in the north and east of the district, renovation hardly touched it: the houses were renovated, but the open spaces were preserved in accordance with the original concept. Highways are elevated above ground level and cut the area into loosely connected squares, and the space around the houses is devoid of hierarchy and is one continuous park. This park is nice, but one glance at it is enough to understand how much resources are spent on its maintenance. But the main problem of H-Buurt, from our point of view, is the lack of diversity.
The tender site is now occupied by two deteriorated multi-storey garages. Our project was based on the Europan 14 “Productive City” theme and Amsterdam's circular economy program. We proposed replacing the garages with a new porous urban planning structure. It looks like a city and a village at the same time, and tries to solve problems of various scales - from the entire city to its immediate surroundings. Our project offers the maximum variety - the sizes of the building plots, the functions (including production), the typologies of houses and open spaces, the possibilities for re-use, rebuilding and completion, the involvement of the local community and various stakeholders. Diversity in this case is intended to breathe new life into the region's economy and make it sustainable and easily adaptable to possible changes in the future.
One of the main questions that we posed to ourselves was how, on the one hand, how to connect our new structure with the surrounding area, and on the other - how it itself can increase its connectedness. We proposed to transform the existing playground into a square with a cultural center - a meeting place and communication between old and new residents.
A kind of micro-centers of the new urban fabric are "production yards", which can be rented for outdoor work, as well as to exhibit samples of their products. We propose to reduce the area of the park between the existing residential buildings at the expense of vegetable gardens, which are also rented. They will grow products that can be tasted in the cultural center during the evenings of national cuisine.
We propose to turn the roads raised above the ground level into city streets. We believe that for this it is not necessary to flatten them, as was done in other areas of Baymer, which were renovated in the 2000s. Plots could be placed along these roads where large developers could build large apartment buildings. Their responsibility will also be the construction of stairs to connect the upper and lower levels. In the interior of buildings, these levels will connect workshops and showrooms - thereby activating both "ground levels".
Other typologies and development options on offer include private homes with workshops that families could build at their own expense and with their own hands, and homes built by cooperatives and small developers, where there are both separate workshops for medium-sized businesses, and large spaces that can collectively lease start-up entrepreneurs, thus reducing costs through the sharing of machines and other equipment.
When and with what project did you get your second victory at Europan? Will this project be implemented?
- It was the 11th session of Europan. I made an offer for Almere - a city not far from Amsterdam, in the youngest province of the Netherlands - Flevoland, where there was water some fifty years ago. The competition plot was located in the Almere Poort area, which has been actively developed since the 2000s. It was located next to the beach and was well visible from the highway and railroad - from the entrance to Flevopolder. The task was to offer a small object with a change in program and location: at first, it was supposed to serve as a pavilion with a cultural function and an information center on the dam, protecting the polder from the water of the artificial lake Aimeer, and then it was planned to sell it as a villa and move it behind the dam, in the wooded part of the polder. …
My proposal was a transforming house. Its upper part is a "box" with a large opening - "emptiness" - in the middle. It is installed vertically on steel supports and becomes a kind of billboard-screen for cars and trains passing nearby. The "emptiness" can become a terrace to admire the surroundings, or a stage for performances. After passing into private hands, the "box" can be placed horizontally: the building will become less visible, but more spacious. The former walls will be transformed into floors and ceilings, the floors into walls, and the "void" in the middle into a private patio.
After the victory, I began to finalize my proposal, but, unfortunately, the project stopped. Museum De Paviljoens, with which the developers of the project, the company Amvest, planned to cooperate to create the cultural content of the project, lost funding and was closed.
How useful do you think Europan is for European architecture and architects?
- A lot of European workshops started their careers with the victory in Europan. For example, MVRDV, Atelier Kempe Thill, Casanova + Hernandez architects, Monolab, Urbanoffice and many others won this competition among Dutch bureaus. It seems that almost every young architect here at least once tried to participate in this competition - in the hope of launching his independent career.
Due to the fact that there are always many participants in the competition, Europan has the opportunity to pose important questions to the young generation of architects that they may not have thought about before, and to push them to give extraordinary answers to them.
Does Europan have evolution, according to your observations?
- The format of the competition has hardly changed during its nearly thirty-year history: municipalities provide land plots, and architects who have not yet turned 40 are invited to develop a solution for them in accordance with the theme declared by the organizers. But the themes are constantly changing, and they can be used to trace which agenda was relevant in the European architectural discourse at one time or another. For example, the topics of the first sessions, in the early 1990s, were devoted to changing lifestyles and the internal structure of residential buildings reflecting these changes. The economy was booming at this time, and living standards were rapidly changing. In the second half of the 1990s, the focus of attention shifted to the “sprawl” of the city, its periphery. In the 2000s, the topic of sustainable development, the relationship between urban and natural landscapes, and the reuse of the existing urban fabric appears. In the two penultimate sessions, participants were asked to reflect on the theme of the "adaptive city". And the topic of the last session - "productive city" - calls for answering the question: how can a production function, after many years of its curtailment, be brought back to cities - so that it becomes an integral part of them, establishes connections between residents, helps the city become truly diverse and sustainable.
Why are not only architects striving to participate, but also municipalities with plots of land? What is the source of their interest? An opportunity to "hold" an architectural competition at someone else's expense?
- Municipalities play a major role in the provision of sites, but other stakeholders are also included in the team. So, for example, in Almere and Emmen, the plots were owned by developers, and subsequently the main work was carried out with them.
The preparatory sessions with the precinct representatives are usually held behind closed doors, and therefore I can only guess at the reasons why they decide to participate. I think they are attracted by the main aspiration of Europan: to find innovative architectural and urban planning solutions for the transformation of cities (in addition to its main task - to help young architects to realize their ideas). And I witnessed this in Emmen and Almera: there, the representatives of municipalities really have bright eyes, they want to make their city better. But, of course, officials are trying not only for altruistic motives. The salaries of municipal officials and the construction quotas allocated to the city directly depend on the number and growth of its population, so that there is a competition between municipalities for residents, and they are directly interested in the development and popularization of their city.
But for housing corporations (wooncorporaties) and developers, participation in Europan is associated with additional difficulties. It is much easier and more efficient to deal with trusted local designers, but here you have to work with architects, albeit with interesting ideas, but often without much experience and knowledge of the local context. It's great that they dare to take this risk.
Should architects working in Russia take an active part in this competition, or is Europan more useful to those who already work in Europe or strive for it?
- Prize-winning place in Europan gives an opportunity to "light up". Still, the main goal of the competition is the implementation of the project. Many teams, if their project eventually went to implementation, opened a workshop in the country where the site was located. I think it is more difficult for participants from Russia to do this than for residents of the EU.
But, in any case, Europan is a very interesting experience that is worth trying to get in touch with. After all, this is a competition of ideas, and you need to reveal them only on three A1 tablets. You don't need to be an expert in local regulations and technology to do this. You just need to offer an interesting, exciting strategy. And then - how lucky …
