Schindler Award Jury Names Top Ten Projects

After a week of intense deliberations, the international jury judging the Schindler Award for Architecture 2007/08 “Access for All” has nominated ten projects. These will be presented at the Award ceremony in Lucerne on November 14, 2008. One winner and four runners-up will be awarded cash prizes at the ceremony and three schools’ prizes will also be announced. The jury also made special mention of four additional projects because of their insights into the issue of accessibility.

The competition task was to revitalize a derelict area of the Austrian capital, Vienna. Amid its impressive city planning, Vienna has its share of derelict areas. At the intersection of the western belt (Westgürtel) and the Vienna River Valley (Wiental), two major city thoroughfares, two metro lines and the channeled Vienna River enclose a large, neglected area, divorced from the hustle and bustle of city life. An impressive steel-trussed metro bridge by Otto Wagner towers above this waste land and mesh of urban infrastructure. With imaginative repositioning and some adjustments to the traffic infrastructure participants should be able to bring the existing potential of the site to life.

Site and urban context within Vienna

The competition aims at improvements that will transform this neglected site into an attractive place of public activity and give a positive impulse to the revival of the adjoining residential and business areas. Participants were required to incorporate four elements into their projects: a public common, residential buildings, a community center and a riverside park with outdoor sport facilities. The aim is to create space that meets three criteria: Quality of life, Sustainability, and Economic viability / Environmental Economics.

Primary roads (grey), metro lines (brown and violet) and sub centers (violet circles)

The ten top projects (see list below) were chosen from a total of 125 submitted by student teams from schools of architecture in Europe. That compares with 88 projects submitted for the previous Schindler Award in 2005/06.

Linke Wienzeile looking south to Margaretengürtel (right hand corner: Brücke über die Wien Zeile)

Prizes are also to be awarded to three of the ten schools represented by the nominated project teams. The schools’ prizes recognize architectural institutions that participated in the Award by pre-judging projects from their school and integrating the topic of accessibility into their curricula. The schools in question will be named at the award ceremony in November, and awarded research grants.

The nominated projects teams and their tutors, as well as the teams singled out for special mention, are invited to the Award Ceremony. Invitations will follow in due course.

All students and professors who participated in the Schindler Award 2007/2008 are also most welcome to attend the Award Ceremony. Please send an e-mail to [email protected], if you would like to participate.

Gaudenzdorfer Gürtel, Burger King, gas station and tour bus parking as seen from Brücke über die Zeile (looking east)

The finalists are:

• “Vienna Carpet”, Martina Sotkovska, Jakub Krcmar; CTU – Faculty of Architecture (Czech Republic)
• “Border Line”, Anne-Emmanuelle Métivier, Anne-Laure Touchais, Virginie Février; Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Bretagne (France)
• “Urban Punctuation”, Gilles Meyer, Julien Rochet, Régis Berthet; Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Strasbourg (France)
• “All Together”, Lydia Lehmann; Tampere University of Technology (Finland)
• “New Urban Landscape – STADT ZWISCHEN RAUM”, Daniel Kühn; Universität Kassel (Germany)
• “Triangle”, Nils Krieger, Thorsten Stelter; FH Koblenz (Germany)
• “Access of All”, Ata Kurt; Middle East Technical University (Turkey)
• “Sin a banane²”, David Scheibner, Richard Huber; Graz University of Technology (Austria)
• “Vienna Versatile”, Philipp Luy; Bauhaus Universität Weimar (Germany)
• “Rough Sketch”, Krisztian Csemy; Academy of Fine Arts and Design, Bratislava (Slovakia)