antigoni
katsakou:
the
competition
generation
a construction scheme other than housing. A4D’s list of works and competition participation, apart from their specialisation in the residential sector of the market, also speaks of their range of action: most of the projects they work or have worked on, concern the cantons of Zurich or Aargau, where the firm’s headquarters are situated. FHV’s competition awards come, except one, from competitions in the Geneva or the Lausanne district, and the bilingual (French- and German-speaking) Fribourg, despite the fact that at the start of their career they were about to set up their practice in Basel16. One reason for the reduced flexibility of architectural firms must be a restriction automatically imposed even onto open calls by the competition language (the language in which the programme is issued and in which, most of the time, the documents, which are demanded by the participants, must be submitted). Language and a firm’s area of action relate of course also to the origins of the firm’s collaborators, which seems to be an equally decisive factor for the firm’s professional trajectory. Christ & Gantenbein have participated during the last five years in several competitions in Germany and two of their current collaborators are of German nationality. Jessen & Vollenweider have a considerable practice and teaching activity in Germany; Anna Jessen’s origins (she was born in Constance) must be related to that fact. She has been teaching as an assistant at Dresden University of Technology before taking up a professorship at the Darmstadt University of Technology (2011), while Ingemar Vollenweider has worked at the Federal Institute of Zurich (ETH) as an assistant under Hans Kolhoff before taking up a professorship at the Kaiserlautern University of Technology. Theirs is another competition success story. They founded their firm in 1998, when they won a competition for the master plan of a housing development in Berlin. Since then, they have been participating systematically in competitions and kept accumulating prizes. Among competitions they have won in the period between 2005 and 2010, there are at least two for residential developments, one of which is the very interesting project of the Schaffhauserrheinweg complex (2009), along the river Rhine. The success stories that I have commented on above certainly confirm the system’s value to the younger generation. Such an intrinsic function of the competition system is undeniably related to the number of procedures organized 16 See Jelk, C., 2009. Newcomers. hochparterre.wettbewerbe n.4, p.23.
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architectural competitions – histories and practice