We proudly announce that after winning the National Archiprix in The Netherlands earlier this year, Filippo Maria Doria has won the International Archiprix 2015 with his project 'Recording and Projecting Architecture' which comprises a design for a Library of the Blind in the Villa Borghese in Rome.
Throughout modern history, the image that Rome has oered visitors has been underpinned by the power that resides in the city. One of the aspects that encapsulates the main stages of Rome’s urban development is the progressive derealization of the city’s physical space, thus reducing and converting material reality into visual spectacle. This process has led to the transformation of central Rome into a spatial construct in the service of representation. The function of representation in Rome’s urban evolution explains the design of a library for the blind. To a blind person, there is always an intermediate phase between the confrontation with physical reality and the formation of an idea of the surroundings, in which the function of the eye is assumed by additional intellectual eort. Lacking the sense of vision as a spontaneous interpretation of space, a blind person is constantly forced to codify the external into verbal and numerical systems in order to delineate the characteristics of the surroundings. Without sight, space loses its certainties and becomes a conjecture, a hypothesis. Similarly, there is a moment of blindness at the origin of architectural representation, a suspension of sight that enables the conception of space. Just before a line is traced, the draughtsman is blind to the visible: the hand, guided by memory and not by perception, thus acquires the capacity of anticipating the visible. The library rises in the park as a freestanding building, walled in, turned inward.
For the third time in recent years, the Border Conditions graduate studio has been awarded a 1st prize in both the National and International Archiprix. Following the awarding of Max Rink’s project in Tallinn (Estonia) in 2009 (Maja Turg Market, with involved mentors Klaske Havik, Micha de Haas and Jan Engels) and Simone Pizzagalli’s project for London Prison project in 2011, with involved mentors Heidi Sohn, Freerk Hoekstra and
Marc Schoonderbeek), Filippo Doria's project is one of seven winners of the 2015 Archiprix International. Doria’s project Recording and Projecting Architecture was part of the Border Conditions Rome Periphery studio with involved mentors: Henriette Bier, Freerk Hoekstra, Pierre Jennen, Oscar Rommens and Marc Schoonderbeek.
See also:
www.archiprix.org/2015/index.php
www.tudelft-architecture.nl/chairs/public-building/
