Blank Space has announced the winners of the third annual Fairy Tales competition, the most competitive edition of the contest yet, with over 1,500 participants. Entrants from 67 countries around the world answered the brief that invited designers to put pen and pencil to paper, writing stories as well as crafting visuals for their submissions.
The winners were chosen by an interdisciplinary jury that included: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentine Galleries; Elizabeth Diller, Founding Partner at Diller Scofidio + Renfro; and Aaron Betsky, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, among many other distinguished judges.
Winners
First Prize
Olson Kundig, led by Principal Alan Maskin, crafted a beautifully rendered story that launches us headlong into the future - a future that is similar enough to our own, yet ripe with new challenges, opportunities, and issues. "Our Fairy Tales 2016 submittal became a tangential detour from Olson Kundig's ongoing investigation into urban rooftops, the largely neglected uppermost layer of cities. The idea of applying a narrative filter - to both built and conceptual projects - became another way to look at and critique design ideas. "Welcome To The 5th Facade" used science fiction as it is traditionally used - as a modality to visualize and imagine a particular future in terms of both the pitfalls and the potential." - Alan Maskin, Principal at Olson Kundig
Second Prize
Hagai Ben Naim, an architecture student, originally from Jerusalem, who deftly leverages satire in "Parisian Lullaby" to address the current climate in Paris and how recent events have affected policy, park space, and the public domain. "Parisian Lullaby is the product of a personal encounter with the urban space and political climate of contemporary Paris, and was triggered by the recent heartbreaking events that took place in the city. The Parisian municipal obsession with governing and ordering life in the public domain gave birth to a series of regulations regarding preservation, maintenance and security. Some of these rules, such as the Second Empire requirement to close public parks at nightfall, date back to the nineteenth century. Through a satirical reworking of the master plan for the new Clichy Batignolles district, Parisian Lullaby raises the question of the relevance of these anachronistic municipal regulations in contemporary Paris. It opens a Pandora's box of cultural critique that unleashes fundamental interrogations related to space and identity, freedom, prejudice, cultural dogma and hypocrisy." - Hagai Ben Naim
Third Prize
Kobi Logendrarajah, an architecture student at the University of Waterloo, for "12 Nautical Miles", an imaginative story that explores how architecture might be created, leveraged, traded, and grown in a literal no-man's-land. "The spark behind the story was inspired by an anime I used to watch back in the day called Black Lagoon that was based on a fictitious island neighboring Thailand. The island was home to many of the world's outcasts, ranging from pirates to deserting soldiers from the Vietnam War. I honed the idea of a place of refuge and expanded it to include a place that escapes the eye of any government, where one can practice their full liberties as they seem fit. I wanted architecture to respond to this social structure and I spawned a scenario that touches upon some of the similar issues that we face today. How we claim that a land is ours, who's allowed to be apart of it, and who was here first were all questions I wanted people to think about deeply about." - Kobi Logendrarajah