By Li Han
Staff Writer of the Tsinghua News Center
Tsinghua graduate students from the School of Architecture won first prize June 1 in the international master class design competition “Form and the City” of the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in the Netherlands. The prize wining team composed of Zhang Ye, Gu Jun, Tang Yang, and Xia Guofan won the prize for their design “New from Old”.
On the theme of city transformation in the Rotterdam’s south end, the Tsinghua team produced a plan “New from Old” which consists of a sloping surface that links the higher elevated metropolitan area with the sea. The powerful form reinforces the monumentality of the grain silo and links the area with a cosmopolitan abode. Designed into the sloping deck are shops, galleries, and a wedding venue. “Our design draws on many successful ideas for transforming older cities in China,” said Zhang Li, the team’s mentor from Tsinghua’s School of Architecture.
The jury expressed the feeling, in making the award, that the imaginative representation went well beyond the set programme. It cited the brilliant way in which the team’s design intertwined the historic heritage and the future. The public space, the jury commented, connects well with the context, and the iconic effect is excellent.
Other participating universities included Berlage Institute of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, TU Delft from the Netherlands, CEPT from Ahmedabad in India, Columbia University from New York, Diego Portales University from Santiago in Chile, ETH from Zurich in Switzerland, Kansai University from Tokyo in Japan, MIT from Cambridge, Massachusetts in the USA, and UPC from Barcelona in Spain. Berlage Institute won second prize and MIT the third prize.
The International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam is a biennial event that gathers together knowledge and experience from all over the world in the design disciplines of architecture, urban design and landscape architecture and brings them to Rotterdam for presentation to a broader international audience.
