PrixdeRome.nl 2010

Staged every four years, the PrixdeRome.nl Architecture is a competition that gives architects, urban planners and landscape architects under the age of 35 an opportunity to display their talents. The award’s previous laureates include designers such as Cornelis van Eesteren (1921), Wim Quist (1958), Piet Blom (1962), Carel Weeber (1966), Koen van Velsen (1986), Adriaan Geuze (1990) and Ronald Rietveld (2006).

Engagement, idealism and optimism were central to the assignment for the preliminary round of the PRIXDEROME.NL 2010. The designers were asked what kind of contribution they could make to an open society in which people from a diversity of ethnic, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds manifest themselves in public space in a self-assured and respectful manner. And might such a contribution help to drive radical shifts in architecture and urban planning, seeing as these often arise in the midst of global crises? The subject of the preliminary round was the August Allebéplein, a square in Amsterdam’s Overtoomse Veld district. The square was an unambiguous urban space when this garden suburb was built in the 1960s, but over the years that clarity has been severely compromised. The design proposals enhance the ‘sense of community’ in the Overtoomse Veld district and investigate what the archetypal urban fi gure of the square could signify today, when encounters between people increasingly occur in virtual space.