Architecture Competition Teamakers Guest House 2nd and Student prize winners - POLITECNICO DI MILANO

We’d like to take the opportunity to introduce you to the 2nd and Student prize winners of our “Teamakers Guest House” competition - Virginia Pozzi and Alessandro Minotti from Italy!

Virginia Pozzi and Alessandro Minotti from Italy

We are two Master’s students of Building Architecture attending Politecnico di Milano, where we also completed our Bachelor’s degree program in Architecture. We collaborated since the first year of our Master’s in our design studio and thesis project, but this is our first collaboration as a competition team and also our first entry for an international competition.

The projects we have been involved with, both separately and together, present a variety of contexts, scales and characters. We worked on projects in different countries, spanning from the urban scale to the construction detail; sometimes we worked with artifacts, other times we designed from scratch. Our common interest is to experiment with architecture and to explore a variety of topics; this competition was in fact particularly attractive to us for being in a completely new context and for investigating a new topic such as the work-living space.

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

For us a space becomes architecture when it transforms a boundary into a connection, which could be between the people, between the landscapes, or, like in this case, between the people and the landscape. It is fundamental for the design to take into consideration the history and the tradition of the place it is settled in, but the architect must develop something new and innovative, improving the knowledge of the past with the experience of contemporaneity.

Why do you participate in architecture vision competitions?

Architecture vision competitions give participants the opportunity to act and design on architectural and social issues, attempting to solve real problems. We believe it is a good way to push ideas and abilities beyond the standard architectural practice, therefore increasing the freedom of thinking widely.

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

Throughout the whole process of creativity and intellectual effort that participants do, it can only be a beneficial exercise and improvement in the architectural practice, especially if you are already interested in the topic. It is also an instructive experience to see how other people managed the same topic developing a different project.