There are few planners who have such a broad base and focus on the big picture as Lola Landscape Architects from Rotterdam. In addition to employing landscape architects, architects and urban designers, they also collaborate with a large number of partners. They conduct research, for example in the large dike project that resulted in the book “Dutch Dikes” and not only mapped and systematized all the dikes in the Netherlands, but also showed how this greatest Dutch invention is likely to play an increasingly important role in the future. This resulted, for example, in plans for a future-proof port of Rotterdam, even with rising water levels. Lola was founded in 2006 and works mainly in the Netherlands and its neighboring countries and in China.
Many of its projects involve the transformation of disused industrial sites or large sports facilities, which, along with parks, is one of the drivers of urban redevelopment.
LaCol Cooperativa are something like the new masters of cooperative housing construction in Barcelona. They are organized as a cooperative and working group. LaCol have played a decisive role in shaping the Barcelona housing construction panorama in recent years and in their own way have had a changing influence, not to say a bit revolutionizing it.
The La Borda project is based on five principles in the creation and use process: autopromoción or self-promotion and direct participation of all partners, the lease of use, the promotion of community life and the strengthening of relationships between the residents, sustainability in view on energy consumption, size of the apartments and lack of parking spaces and finally affordability, in which the cooperative is also an alternative for low-income earners.
The collective undoubtedly contributes to making a metropolis like Barcelona, where rents are constantly rising due to speculative pressure and access to affordable housing is becoming increasingly difficult, more livable.
The young Leipzig architectural practice SummaCumFemmer is nominated for the Schelling Architecture Award 2022. The practice has been made up of the two founders and spouses Florian Summa and Anne Femmer since 2015. The oeuvre they have built so far is still small, but it has caused quite a stir.
Together with Juliane Greb, they built a very remarkable residential building in the Munich district of Riem, which can be interpreted as a signpost for future affordable and sustainable inner-city living for everyone.
The Schelling Architecture Award 2022 goes to Sophie Delhay, Paris. The French architect, who founded her own office in Paris in 2008, has become a leading figure in the renewal of urban housing in just a few years.
In her search for a socially relevant architecture, Delhay is almost exclusively concerned with all possible forms of multi-storey housing – an area of construction that seems to offer only minimal freedom across Europe because it is bogged down in the constraints of global real estate financing and land speculation. Starting point for her designs is always specific research into the way of life of future residents.
Sophie Delhay understands her preoccupation with the grievances of today’s housing construction as a very personal, socio-political choice. For her, making suggestions as an architect as to how housing construction can be brought out of its impasse means changing society.
Paola Vigano is one of the key voices in the European debate on pressing issues of today’s urban development – questions that she addresses in her theoretical writings , but also gives answers as a practical planner.
As an urban planner, Paola Vigano took part in the major international urban development and restructuring competitions (Grand Paris, Bruxelles 2040, Antwerp, Moscow and Geneva) and decisively shaped them with her ideas – until 2014 together with Bernardo Secchi. As an architect, however, she has also designed a number of outstanding public buildings, squares and conversions of cultural institutions, such as the Theaterplein in Antwerp, realized together with Bernardo Secchi.
As a theoretician, she has been involved with her essays and writings in the discussion of central terms in the European urban debate over the past 25 years – for example in the critical examination of the ‘Città diffusa’. She had a decisive influence on the concept of a ‘porous city’, which has been important over the past ten years, and only recently with the publication on “The Horizontal Metropolis” she gave another impetus for the qualification of public space in a transformed urban landscape.
