2A Asia Architecture Award 2016

Wolfgang Tschapeller
– Master in Architecture from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY
– Professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and as of 2012 he is the head of the Institute of Art and Architecture
Contributions to the exhibition New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Asia-Pacific 2008 in Tokyo and 2010 in Istanbul, as part of the exhibition Sculptural Architecture in Austria at the National Art Museum of China in 2006

1- Criteria for all categories except interior and urban design:

It was in the month of October 2016 when we gathered in Vienna to discuss the prizes of the 2A magazine. What is 2A and why Vienna?
2A is an International Magazine, which promotes intelligent, comprehensive and innovative architecture practices in Asia. Vienna is considered to be the turning platform between eastern and western Europe. For Long this city has allowed for many negotiations to happen, be it political, economical or even within the arts. It has also been the city of radical thought, attracting some very important artists and architects in the past and even recently. Where better than the Academy of Fine Arts, where the likes of Otto Wagner and Peter Behrens, Peter Sloterdjk or even Harun Farocki more recently, contributed to the foundations of architectural and art education?
I was approached by the organisers to take part in the “grand prize” of the magazine as a jury member, having spent eleven years of my teaching life in Vienna. I was delighted to be able to contribute once again to the debate on architecture. However I was not expecting to be elected as the president of the jury and have the task of writing an article on this very rich experience.
But then, here we are!…
It was an honour and a great challenge to work with an international team of architects, academics and critics from Turkey, Japan, Iran, France, and Austria. The variety of the projects from interior design, to urbanism and large-scale public spaces passing through, residential projects, public schools, and unrealised projects made the task both difficult as well as stimulating.
When projects vary in scale and are situated in different countries such as Iran, Bangladesh, China, Japan, Turkey, India, Korea etc… the jury needs to construct a set of viable criteria through which it considers the various contributions, as well as allowing for the finalists to propose what architecture needs to address in our societies.
The jury had some very in depth discussions on topics such as economy, social and programmatic challenges that architects are faced in these countries. The shortage of material, the political and economical diversity and the need for architecture that assumes a certain image of progress and technical literacy made the task of comparison and judging evermore challenging.
As much as we are part of a global network and the planet seems to have similar concerns such as climate change, water shortage, material scarcity and economical disparity, architecture tends to remain a very local discipline. It is still tied to the local systems of economy, material and building technologies. Though some of the production ignores the relevance of site and its specificities, concentrating on parametric and formal concerns, there is still a huge number of architects who seem to still believe in the idea that architecture matters. Although most of the projects we looked at used very different building techniques, had different budgets and varied programmes, we managed to have a set of criteria with which we could compare the vast number of projects submitted.
Some of these criteria were the pertinence with which the project was adding quality of life to the place and culture that it was built. The beauty and elegance of the work in relationship to the given programme and budget, the capacity of the project to create a contribution and discussion to the greater debate of architecture…
We managed to extract the quality of each project related to its production conditions and the means with which the architects had managed to contribute to the site, the landscape or the city where it was situated.
The discussion on the projects and their presentation was also a central theme of the jury. Most of the projects were images of moments in the buildings very few projects had the proficiency and dexterity to simply describe and illustrate the main concerns and ideas of the projects. The urban projects were very difficult to understand. I had seen some of the projects and therefore could describe them but otherwise it was very difficult to understand the main axis of thinking through the drawings and the panels presented.
It seems that the architecture discipline is travelling through a major crisis; the difficulty of illustration and description of complexity is leading to tools that are more about management than inscription, narration and authorship. Is the timeless, scale-less world of digital production the reason for this? Are we all to be collective authors? We don’t know but there is one thing that is certain; that architects need to reinvent how to tell their stories.