Architecture competition "Pape Bird Observation Tower" 3rd prize winners - Simon Barret, Tom Mestiri, Chloé Meyer and Hugo Ramos-Guerrero

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the winners of the 3rd prize of our “Pape Bird Observation Tower” competition -  Simon Barret, Tom Mestiri, Chloé Meyer and Hugo Ramos-Guerrero from France!

Simon Barret and Hugo Ramos-Guerrero

Chloé Meyer and Tom Mestiri

Minga qualifies a collective and participative way of working, building and thinking together, engaged to reach a common goal, serving the population. The term “minga” refers to a South American cultural tradition of collective and communautary-aimed reunion.

Atelier Minga is a collective currently being formed by young architects, designers and photographers.

The four of us met during a student exchange at Santiago de Chile in 2013. We all share the same taste for traveling and architecture, landscape architecture and design. We are currently working on different structures and architecture competitions allow us to experiment, practice and develop our architectural production through other architectural prisms.

Brief information about the projects that you/your company have been involved with. For instance what scale have you focused on/preferred, any significant projects where company/ individuals have been involved?

We aim to focus on small to large scaled projects, from design to urban development projects.

We engage the competitions in our practice to open our field of action to future projects, empathizing in finding the essence of architecture, through problems linked with the context.

Our production aims to specify the relevance of the detail to reveal the quintessence of the project with clear understanding of form, main intentions and concepts.

In this same vision, through all range of scales, our design production aims to reveal this engagement around the simplicity and purity of an idea or project.

What does architecture mean to you and what is the role of an architect in your society?

The architect’s engagement in today’s society must be to have a social and political, research responsibility beyond our practice. Inventing new ways of using and practicing space. The architect is engaged in the production of a cultural, social, historical legacy able to embrace and adapt to the contemporary stakes of our society.

Why do you participate in architecture vision competitions?

We believe those open architecture vision competitions aim to reveal the liberty of conception, the freedom of questioning an architectural, social, geographical, cultural, political problem or context. It allows us to push forward through the boundaries of what the day-to-day architectural practice has to offer. It pushes beyond our practice to extend to global problems of a punctual question. In this way, it allows us to integrate the research in our professional practice and develop a scientific approach to any question. Furthermore, these competitions allow us to assert our ideas, envies and potential as young architects.

What advice would you give to individuals who struggle to decide whether it would be beneficial for them to participate in architecture vision competitions?

Go on, take a stab at it!