NEB Prizes 2022: All Applications

Enable the Future is an innovative housing concept that creates holistic sustainability by creating flourishing communality out of wellbeing people. The core of this housing concept is to create resiliency out of transformable and versatile apartments in order to answer the challenges posed by the contemporary world. By investing in the users wellbeing with solutions that simultaneously benefit the environment, this concept creates positive feedback loops of action toward sustainability.

What is sustainability really? How can we educate citizenship? How can we design new architectures in the problematic contemporary city? The regeneration project of the former waste-to-energy plants in Colleferro, near Rome, attempts an approach based on flexibility, temporariness and temporality: the industrial complex becomes the "City of education and sustainable development 2030" which through the functions of super reuse and crops alternatives offers a vision of hope for humanity’s future.

The "Summer of Pioneers" is a project for “trial” living and co-working in rural areas. For 6 months, 20 selected creatives and knowledge workers ("pioneers") are provided affordable, furnished living spaces as well as co-working spaces in a previously vacant castle by the participating municipality, Tengen in southern Germany. In return, the pioneers contribute to the community with new impulses and cultural activities, and thus contribute to the revitalization of otherwise neglected areas.

Stan Allen says that infrastructures are understood as systems of monumental scale that make an extraordinary effort to satisfy very specific needs. But what happens when, despite their optimistic intentions, they fail? What happens when their construction is not completed? And above all, what value can bring to the landscape an element of monumental scale, designed to fulfill a specific function and which, paradoxically, has become obsolete?

The project aims to raise and answer these questions

Lamia Santolina (Apulia, Italy) is a space of research, a residency center for art and earth that questions through artistic practice the ecosystemic relationships of the environment. 

The garden has more than 400 varieties of endemic and Mediterranean drought-resistant plants. Built in lime and hemp, the studio is reached by a natural path. The oblique and soft angles, the white lime, suggest the place of thought.

With our project ‘Braunfelser Str.’ and in cooperation with our partner Gewobau, we implemented the in-house developed and patented procedure ‘WoVita’. Next to energy-efficient retrofitting, this procedure puts aging and an easily accessible habitation into the focus of the renovation. By this we create an environment that provides optimal comfort levels to older and physically restricted tenants. The additional storey up of the existing building is valuable in generating needed housing space.

Originally, the former DIY store was merely a shell on a paved surface that served sales and consumption. But how can a sustainable utilization concept be combined with the potentials of the warehouse construction to define a trend-setting way of dealing with vacancies? In the future, the DIY store structure could span a centre filled with life. As a meeting place for everyone in Bergedorf, the hall retains its transformability in the future.

The history of Europe has always been linked to the avant-garde and artistic discoveries. Nowadays it is necessary to take on challenges such as the impact of tourism on our cities as well as facing the progressive aging of European population, the climatic emergency, the extreme urbanization and the rural exodus. MODULART is a creative idea and an alternative proposal for these issues. It is a typological reinvention of the museums as places in constant transformation connected to people.

A kiosk proposal alongside the “Red Thread (Landschaftszug),” a historical trail in Dessau, Germany. The disassembled Soviet-era prefabricated concrete panels are rearranged and stacked to form a kiosk typology, adding retail and recreational space to reactivate the currently underutilized green band. The recycling and reuse of concrete panels not only consumes construction waste but also restores city memories as well as history.

Sometimes certain meteorological phenomena are seen as “enemies”. Fog is often perceived as a discomfort. However, what if we tried to see it as a resource and an opportunity? What if we could capture it and turn it into water that could be made available to human and non-human communities? Pink Net is an ecological device that wants to resonate with the environment: it captures water and the sun, recycles existing plastics, increases biodiversity, lights up cities and much more!