[III] Winners of the 2012 ar+d Emerging Awards

The Architectural Review has shared with us the winners of the 2012 ar+d (the Architectural Review + d line) Emerging Architecture Award for young professionals under the age of 45. Engaging with an emerging generation of architects, the ar+d Awards capture a spirit of creative resilience and present a unique insight into the critical preoccupations that will shape the future of architecture.

The visual force and impact of an extremely modest building is amplified by setting an exo-skeleton of black-stained vertical wood studs out a half foot and more from the well-insulated walls. These add a degree of privacy in front of bathroom and bedroom windows, but are cut away to provide unimpeded light and view for the huge picture windows in living and work rooms. When viewed obliquely by the heavy traffic along Grant Avenue, the studs visually congeal to form a banded but continuous form.

Bloc 10 Housing, 5468796 Architecture, Winnipeg, Canada.

The question of affordable housing lurks, the recurring bad dream of contemporary architecture. The difficulty of building dwellings simply and well imparts a night terror to many of us, and we are unable to deny its sepulchral truths in the days that follow. The Art Nouveau era—much like the similarly sinuous boom of the last decade—were times of splendidly urbane apartment blocks, or villas in city or countryside brimming with lush ornamentation and restless surfaces.

But at the end of the First World War, the profession turned as one (in Continental Europe, at least, where destruction was most concentrated) to the problem of affordable housing. Whether the German debate about existenzminimum, Le Corbusier’s speculations about the house as a “a machine for living,” to the prototypes, both good and bad, tested at Stuttgart’s 1927 Wiesenhofsiedlung, new housing forms to repair a blasted Europe were the heart of the Modern project.

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Photography © James Brittain. A three-storey timber-frame apartment block on the most ordinary corner in an inner suburb, bloc 10 could hardly be more different from the artful, occasionally arty creations of this older generation. Balconies have cut-away sections to allow views from within the flat, and screened sections for extra privacy.

Sectional perspective showing how flats are spread across storeys both horizontally and vertically.

The designers jettisoned the banalities of the doubly-loaded apartment building layout, and were inspired instead by that twistingly puzzling creation of Hungarian architecture professor ernö rubik.

Ground floor plan. With no building lobby, each of the 10 units is entered from their own private door on the street or rear lane, these main floor rooms used variously as kitchens, work rooms, or even bedrooms (the building has condominium ownership, and initial residents got raw space with plumbing available throughout, so each could ascribe uses to the rooms as they wished).

Plans levels. The main structure is five bays at 18 feet wide each, the standard width of a Winnipeg townhouse, meaning off -the-shelf wood joists could be used, cutting costs.

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Canada 5468796 Architecture

When Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture were highly commended in the 2010 AR Awards for Emerging Architecture for the OMS Stage they flew their whole team to Europe for the prize giving. The Canadian posse was 12 strong, including the project developer, and together they rented a house and ‘made London home’ for a few days. It was their first taste of international recognition, just three-and-a-half years into their careers, and was significant not only for them but also for the community of local start-up practices that have emerged in Winnipeg in recent years. Stuck in the middle of Canada, Winnipeg is, by their own admission, a remote and conservative place, where it is difficult to convince people of the value of architecture and design. Now, however, a clutch of 10 or so new practices are challenging the status quo, and helping to revive the Modernist legacy established by the disciples of Wright, Mies and Gropius who came to the region in the ’60s and ’70s to help make the Department of Architecture at the University of Manitoba one of the strongest Modernist schools in Canada. As practice founder Sasa Radulovic says, however, ‘over the last 20 or so years, the scene has been relatively stale’, so sensing a renaissance in the offing, in everything they do − from practice teaching to public engagement − they seek to raise the profile of architecture.