Piranesi Awards Go to the Austrians and Italians
Last week yet another Piranski dnevi arhitekture (Piran Days of Architecture) closed, an annual international conference traditionally held in neighboring Slovenia for the 28th year running. We covered last year’s success of Croatian architects in Piran here, when the awards deservedly went to Studio UP as well as students Suzana Lunić and Tina Busatto. Alas, Croatians didn’t have reason to celebrate at this year’s Piran Days of Architecture the awards went towards Austria and Italy for the most part.
The International 2011 Piranesi Award went to Marte.Marte Architekten for his Aflenzbrücke bridge project in the small Austrian village of Lorüns.
The panel of judges, which consisted of lecturers from this year’s Piran Days of Architecture, headed by Croatian architect Vera Grimmer, selected precisely this project amongst 36 other contenders, with the following statement:
The project can be viewed as both a sculpture and an engineering achievement. It is architecture with a fine correlation to its surrounding landscape; the smoothness of the concrete is in an ideal relationship with the elements of the nature surrounding it. The project relates to the historical railway bridges, but it is also depicted through another, new material with a strong dose of contemporary expressiveness.
Italian architects from the Magnani Pelzel Map Studio got an Honorable Mention for their renovation project of the Torre Porta Nuova tower in Venice.
Just to note as a reminder, The Piran Days of Architecture is an international conference annually held from 1983 onwards in the Slovenian town of Piran. The goal of the conference is determining and valorizing current architectural trends and presentation of the most progressive and most innovative ideas in the field of architectural production. This internationally reputed manifestation focuses on the importance and influence of architecture within the current European cultural context. An exhibition of the realizations of recently accomplished projects by Central European architects is held annually, and the best project, as voted by a panel of judges, is awarded the Piranesi Award, named after the 18th century artist and architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi, whose family’s origins are traced back to Piran. In addition to awards for realized projects of more or less established architectural practices, a Piranesi Student’s Honorable Mention is awarded for competing projects in the student category including eight regional faculties.
The nominations model for the annual award operates as follows: a selected commissioner within each country suggests five projects which proceed to compete for the Piranesi Award. This year’s commissioner for Croatian projects was Branko Silađin, and in addition to Croatia, the following countries also compete for the Piranesi Award: Austria, Czech Republic, Greece, Croatia, Hungary, Italy, Slovakia as well as Slovenia, the host country.
Silađin proposed the following candidates to represent Croatia this year: The Lone Hotel in Rovinj by 3LHD, the Croatian Bishop Conference Building by Nenad Fabijanić, Country House in Bijača by Ćurković and Zidarić, the Lauba (by architects Alenka Gačić Pojatina, Branka Petković, Ana Krstulović and Morana Vlahović) and the Project ‘5 Little House in Silba’ by Iva Letilović and Igor Pedišić.
In addition to the awards for realized projects of more or less established architectural practices, eight faculties from the region compete for the Student Piranesi Award. The Croatian commissioners in charge of student projects were Darovan Tušek from the University of Split Faculty of Civil Engineering and Architecture and Lovorka Prpić and Miroslav Geng from the University of Zagreb Faculty of Architecture.
This year, both awards in the student category went to students from The Graz University of Technology, Stefan Jos for the The Berlin Stage Project and Michael Lammer for the Auditorium and Congress Center in Terezin, the Czech Republic.
Click here for further details on lectures and awards at this year’s Piran Days of Architecture
