NEB Prizes 2023: All Applications

‘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.

Nature’s Library is a circular steel and chain installation designed for a courtyard in an Augustinian monastery in Vilnius Old Town. The structure will channel rain to modular plant beds that form its base, where residents will be encouraged to grow herbs, spices and local plants. The aim is to revive this derelict part of the monastery through community engagement, and make it a living natural library that will change with the weather and seasons.

In the current crisis of paradigms taken for granted, the peri-urban fabric represents the territory of rebirth, overcoming the globalizing and unifying vision to make room for a multiform logic capable of taking into account the diverse needs of the "peoples" who inhabit our everyday life. The constant and historical Human/Nature opposition loses its place in favor of a vision that takes into account what we thought was inert: in Gaia, the totality of these beings, finds its name.

The idea of Piss Soap is to offer a new place for waste and discarded material that we load in trash bags and dispose of. The project offers a new cycle of life to waste, creating a circular economy and production that contributes actively to reducing our impact on the environment, while benefiting directly our urban surroundings. Piss soap challenges our understanding of the binary of dirtiness and cleanliness and invites the maker and user to realign their vision upon discarded matter.

The project is a civic space that allows the Venetian public to express and enjoy various art forms, such as visual and performing arts. The theme is delineated by three basic needs of people living in a city like Venice: Rest, Culture, and Conviviality. All this is in a green and multifunctional space that allows the needs of those who want to express themselves with their art to be met. The aim is to promote encounters in an environment that welcomes culture and the beauty of conviviality.

The city conforms to green zones and urban zones. Green and nature are placed in certain places and buildings are discordant and individual riverbeds. "NEST" intends to recognize the possibility of dwellings, particularly of areas that offer openings to the outdoors ( balconies, gardens), to accommodate systems of interspecies and encounter, of care and sustainability by creating sustainable products that allow for the presence and coexistence of humans and non-humans.

A quiet durational resistance to the fast paced construction of infrastructure to inform slow regeneration