NEB Prizes 2022: All Applications

CAN GUINEU is an ephemeral architecture project to enable sustainable rural community building through arts and culture. Through this temporary intervention, a local heritage site is made accessible to citizens for the first time since its public acquisition. Supporting artistic events, cultural performances and social gatherings, CAN GUINEU becomes a local hub to bring communities together, fostering social cohesion and prompting a sense of belonging and of shared ownership of the place.

BEAUTIFUL FAILURES works on fragility, identifying the two most delicate materials of the celebrated Mies van der Rohe Pavilion, glass and the travertine of the pavement, to revisit this seemingly perfect architecture from its most vulnerable side. BEAUTIFUL FAILURES seeks a more inclusive and sustainable approach to our cultural heritage and material culture through re-use and re-reading, exploring the empathy generated by aesthetic attitudes that develop an affective relationship of care. 

Structural handicaps, lack of services and depopulation problems are keywords that define the so-called "internal areas" which represent the 70% of the Italian territories. On the other hand, these territories have great potential thanks to their traditions, culture and naturalness. The idea is to give new life to the abandoned heritage along soft mobility itineraries, to trigger the slow tourism, to create services and to give economic input aimed at the resilience of these peripheral areas.

Gamified Cohousing, born out of the research of “Architectural Democracy”, addresses two major problems in cities: loneliness and misuse of natural resources. With our business model of “service co-development” and it’s five step implementation plan we can turn any empty building, together with their local owners, into a thriving resilient cohousing and coworking community, regardless of its location.

Our goal is to reduce the environmental impact of the fashion industry, by ensuring that textile waste does not end up in landfills, but is used as a raw material to produce circular products. After 3 years of experience in the management of used clothes,we have created Re4Circular: the first technology based on Artificial Intelligence, which automates the cataloguing and digitization of textile waste, connected to a B2B digital marketplace that allows to direct the clothes towards circular uses

The House of Hearts weekly live stream of arts, music and open talks in times of the COVID-19 lockdown portrayed a vast number of European and international artists, musicians, food bloggers, pilots, social entrepreneurs to keep connected within the European dimension. Exchanging informally within the private surroundings of the artists’ own living rooms, kitchens or other private places to deliver a strong sign of hope and reconnection, impulses, inspiration, music and art.

Contemporary workers are becoming the modern nomads who are looking for the right spot to stay productive. This SPOT in our proposal is an individual mobile working unit, which comes with the specific material and transfer mode and is aimed at workers who need to work with flexibility of their own customized and hygienic space, in any public or private context; Promoting the idea that can work for the job missions, pandemic situations and even the future of smart working. 

Public outdoor pools are as much a part of summer as ice cream and sunburn, the smell of chlorine and French fries. They are the most democratic of all places, offering spaces of encounter and community. Nevertheless, public pools are on the retreat, especially in rural areas. Rippershausen, a small village in Thuringia, is bucking this trend and has maintained its own swimming pool for 51 years. A structural and architectural redesign of the site is now to contribute to the further development.

The main idea is to make an innovative gazebo for people, which is also green - it uses solar energy and it will be used as a source of information about a city or area. Through the photovoltaics it will be possible to build a charging station for phones and it will be possible to power a router, which will provide free Wi-Fi for people. QR codes will be used to generate information about the area or city.

The work focuses on explaining the concept of pro-sociality and its role in the adaptation of post-industrial facilities based on the analysis of selected projects from Europe. The conclusions from the analysis and public opinion polls of city residents, served as the basis for the development of a program to save the historic factory of Robert Biedermann’s in Łódź and help city residents by creating a place that does not exclude anyone.