2018 YTAA Winners Announced

As we pointed out when announcing the 12 finalists and 40 shortlisted projects last month, YTAA aims to "support the talent of recent graduates – the architects, urban planners and landscape architects who will be responsible for transforming our environment in the future – as they enter the professional world." Submissions came from registered schools in Europe and, for the first time this year, from China and South Korea: 334 nominated diploma projects from schools in 34 countries.

The four winners of the YTAA 2018:

• Hendrik Brinkmann, College of Architecture, Media and Design Berlin University of the Arts
• Matthew Gregorowski, The Cass Faculty of Art Architecture & Design London Metropolitan University
• Loed Stolte, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment Delft University of Technology
• Julio Gotor Valcárcel, Madrid School of Architecture Polytechnic University of Madrid

NEUE BAU|AKADEMIE BERLIN - a club for the former & future architecture

Hendrik Brinkmann, from Berlin University of the Arts, focused on a contested Berlin site that was home to Karl Friedrich Schinkel's 1832 Bauakademie. Damaged in WWII, the brick building was demolished in the early 1960s to make way for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of East Germany, which was torn down three decades later following reunification. With calls to rebuild Schinkel's Bauakademie, Brinkmann goes a different route and "studies Schinkel’s ideas and visions and reinvents them in a playful way."

​The Jury considered that the author sets a rhetorical project with questions to be asked with engagement, implicitly having a social and cultural relevance.

Deplorable Framework

Matthew Gregorowski, from London Metropolitan University, ambitiously proposed a "holistic reinvention of the British countryside." Responding to "a series of housing, elderly care, and landscape management crises," Gregorowski's project imagines new estates in underused portions of the UK's national parks, documenting the changes with beautiful drawings.

The Jury was attracted by the complexity of the post Brexit situation and how the author deals with a strong concept to reimagine this new situation.

The Bank of England: a dialectical project

​Loed Stolte, from Delft University of Technology, designed an impressive building over a building: a contemporary addition to John Soane's "ruin-esque" Bank of England. Mixing historical images with amazing design drawings, Stolte's project confronts history in a manner that is refreshing yet respectful.

The Jury was startled by the originality of this project, an intellectual piece of work which is extremely solid: the ruin, the money, the bank. The drawings are amazing and they are complemented by an incredible piece of writing.

Perdido (Lost) -P.R.U.S. of Madrid

​Julio Gotor Valcárcel, from Polytechnic University of Madrid, looked to the history of Madrid, specifically the medieval unerground Mayras built with Roman vault construction. Those forgotten spaces would be recovered and made accessible. Based on extensive research done via 3D software, the new public spaces would poetically link our contemporary age to antiquity.

The Jury highlighted that the project works with different scales at the same time: urban, infrastructure and the tectonics, through experimentation with the architectural system.