Archiprix Jury Member
Rethink and Repair
In March I spent two days in TU Delft as a member of the jury panel for Archiprix 2025, my first jury role, our job was to assess twenty-six of the best graduation projects across architecture, urbanism, interior architecture and landscape architecture, which emerged from the different universities and academies in the Netherlands in 2025.
Please read the full jury report written by Anne Hoogewoning here
During our deliberations the core concepts of Rethink and Repair emerged as a thread connecting the different work. The breadth of work was striking, the twenty-six projects addressed many different themes, contexts and locations, however the orientation was the same: design as a way of listening, of giving voice, of attending to the human and non-human in specific places with specific needs.
A noticable shift is in how students deal with environmental issues, in the recent past sustainability as a project addition was something projects explicitly announced. That's largely gone. The selected projects didn't make explicit claims because it didn't need to, the different approaches were intrinsically climate aware and ecologically responsive. This signals that climate literacy is something which has become deeply embedded in the cirricula of the different schools. Students now understand how to work with natural systems and apply circular thinking in their designs, there is also a deeper understanding of the systems, housing, heritage, migration that shape the built environment and students are able to make statements with their work that addresses this complexity.
The projects that moved us most were not the ones with grand visions. They were the ones that chose a much more sensitive and empathetic standpoint. With this approach these students managed to find a way into a specific system, a water system, a landscape system, a housing system, a migration policy, and asked: how can the faults found here be repaired? Attending to what exists, working with it rather than past it, listening before proposing: this signals a shift in approach the field has been moving toward for some time. To quote from the Jury report
“There are already countless indications that, in the future, humanity will have to make do with less. Resources are finite, energy networks are overburdened and the intensive use and urbanization of the landscape increasingly damage ecosystems. As writer Christiaan Weijts recently noted in NRC: ‘Scarcity is not an occupier, but an ally.’ In this light, the notions of ‘rethink’ and ‘repair’ take on an urgent significance as alternative design visions to the prevailing paradigm of growth and renewal.”
