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Reviewing the work produced by this year’s batch of graduates from the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture was an enjoyable experience. That is because a good number of the projects display a breadth of intelligence that pushes us to reflect and ask ‘why not?’ But what are criteria by which we should assess the projects? I think that four criteria are important: imagination, justification, materialization and ease. Let me briefly deal with each of these. First, imagination. More than anything else, this is the main thing to keep in mind when assessing the quality of work by students. Does a project try and move away from the familiar modes and models of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture? Does a design propose something new? I was happy to see that many of the projects on display did exactly those things, albeit with mixed results. New kinds of spaces and new ways of using spaces were proposed. Moreover, there were spaces that made me wonder whether they were public or private, and that ambiguity is a positive quality. Many of these graduation projects have the capacity to make us believe in something new, something that could be interesting for our contemporary city. Second, justification. Every strong project should justify the proposal it is making. Often, we see students producing work that is sufficiently convincing in terms of design quality and elaboration, yet the result does not seem to have been prompted by a genuine question or problem. The truth is that good design always justifies itself. We look at a proposal and immediately comprehend what the designer wants to make and, importantly, why. On top of that, we understand that the designer is offering us a plausible response to a real need. A design should make us believe in its feasibility, and should make us want its construction to start tomorrow if possible. It is worth noting in this regard that many designs propose to increase the density of parts of the city. We can propose this as designers, but at the same time we should be aware that density is not the answer to urban dispersal. It is an illusion to think that density alone is a solution. The designer’s task is not to tell people what to do or where to live. All we can do as professionals is to offer possibilities. Many designers think that they possess the power to dictate what people may and may not do, but that is simply not the case. Third, materiality. Some projects explore in more depth the issue of how to make things, how to turn a design into real matter. In Italy and France, where I have done most of my teaching, students are completely lost when it comes to making things. The same is also true of those who come to work at my office. That is because during their education they focus much more on the image they are producing, and much less on how to turn that image into matter, something made of material. What we have to teach students, of course, is that architecture always has a materiality. It is heavy and must resist the weather outside. That awareness is sometimes lacking in the graduation schemes. And where it is present, we see that the students have elaborated their designs right down to the level of the construction details.