NEB Prizes 2023: All Applications

This project is regenerating a ruined 16th-century dovecote (colombier) into a 500-year ecological infrastructure to support an agro-ecological renaissance in rural France. Currently under restoration by a team of artists, ecologists, and technologists, this 3-story heritage building is being repurposed as library, seedbank, and makerspace to restart a selective forestry cycle and restore the biodiversity of the surrounding forest and farmlands for present and future generations.

In the last few decades, the furniture market has changed dramatically, replacing good quality items with more accessible fast furniture. This transformation and the huge growth of moving people has caused a severe excess of furniture . It is hard to resell these unused items, so people are forced to throw them away, despite their good condition.
Oltreché connects the objects’ owners to donate, to people who cannot afford new furniture.

The chaotic reality of Venice allows people to find their refuge in a natural habitat, a source of regeneration, where they can become aware of their time, respect it, and identify new points of observation: visual glimpses. Focus defines a space for observation and recollection within Vignole Island creating a human-centered design solution and promoting sustainability, mindfulness and community engagement.. A cathartic path filtered through both physical and mental ascent within the space.

Project Safe Refuge is a bottom-up international collaboration, aiming to provide sustainable housing solutions during crisis situations, through a multidisciplinary knowledge exchange. Our goal is to create a sustainable, scalable and easy-to-transport housing unit for refugees coming to the cities that are struggling with a housing crisis. In almost a year we orginized several participatory workshops, gathered data from the survey and participated in manufacturer workshop in Netherlands.

Today, the Tiber River is a huge urban void, low in relation to the city quota.
Our aim is to re-imagine the Lungotevere animated by a variety of activities, able to inspire a collective involvement in order to transform the site in the theatre of Rome daily life.
The (no-more only) retentive walls, released from their monumental rigidity, would be conceived as an adaptative structure, resilient both in absorbing the surrounding and generating aliveness.
Water is material and design element.

The Otherworldliness creates spaces for an informal and dynamic symbiosis of production and projection for Nollywood movies. It is located in the biggest European greenhouses agglomeration in southern Spain, Almeria. The project manifests in a sequence of artefacts, which tenses the voids within the homogeneous polyethylene landscape of the largest concentration of greenhouses in the world, covering 26,000 hectares. Artefacts bring together displaced immigrants from Sub Sahara.

‘From the city to the spoon’ is an experiment that - starting from an idea of a heterogeneous city - proposes the synthesis of a paradigm that can turn the minimalism of a school building into the complexity of a diversified system.
A prototype project to work in the neighborhoods of cities around the world and co-design solutions to shape more accessible habitats for everyone and identify opportunities to build more inclusive, intergenerational and resilient cities.

A versatile and sustainable piece of furniture as it can be easily transformed from chair to table and vice-versa, offering a complete recircularity of its pieces and a wide range of spatial configurations to encourage creativity and communication.
Tree is based on ecological wooden materials and its fixed joints are replaced by removable parts of recycled plastic using 3D pellet printing without the need to resort to external production avoiding greater logistics and therefore more pollution.

This project examines how through material experience, the philosophy of “think globally act locally” and experimentation of tinkering it’s possible to renew and imagine new materials, products, and processes in a specific territorial context. During the research emerged a design framework on materials and territories enabled a different design approach that allowed to re-discover and re-innovate traditional materials and led to a renewed vision of their role as bearers of local values.

The Hambach mine has long been a symbol of sacrifice for Germany's economic progress and at the same time the fight against fossil fuels. With the energy transition and climate agreements, this huge lignite is to be closed and turned into a lake.
Aim of the project is the enhancement of the post-mining landscape as an exceptional habitat that - once mining activities have ceased - constitutes a unique environment within which secondary succession takes place.