Architecture competition Baltic Way Memorial 2nd prize winners - Alessandro Arcangeli, Rory Alasdair Downes and Silvio Pennesi

We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce the 2nd prize winners of our Baltic Way Memorial competition - Alessandro Arcangeli, Rory Alasdair Downes and Silvio Pennesi from Netherlands!

Alessandro Arcangeli, Rory Alasdair Downes and Silvio Pennesi from NetherlandsWe became friends while beginning our studies for the Architecture Masters Program at TU Delft in September 2015 and decided to form a collective in order to discuss our positions on architecture, and attempt some projects outside of our course requirements. With varied backgrounds in architecture, design, photography, music, business and with experiences traveling to and living in different parts of the world, we established a goal to crystallise our directions on architectural design. We are currently working on our online ‘manifesto’ - an open document combining our positions on architecture and our own projects that we hope to develop over the course of our time together at TU Delft.

This is our first project together since we met at TU Delft. We are each involved with different studio courses and have been pushed in various directions as a result, which has provided a lively and interesting discourse during the development of our work so far. Collectively, we have past experience in practice and private work, ranging from humanitarian architecture in Tanzania, to competition entries for large scale public buildings to private client residential developments.

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

We don't know! We believe it is far more interesting to alleviate oneself of a definite, absolute position on architecture, since our studies of architectural history has shown this is relatively futile in the end. One of the reasons we have established this collective is to bring together people with completely different understandings of architecture. It is in bringing varied perspectives together that we believe architecture can be fruitful but also pragmatic.

Why do you participate in architecture vision competitions?

Certainly not because we have any free time! It has been very difficult to balance our course requirements with entering ideas competitions. Our course and the process of entering ideas competitions consists of extremely different pressures and constraints. We believe there can exist a healthy dialogue between the two when executed simultaneously. This can go some way to helping us overcome the never-ending issue of ‘too much study not enough practice' that dominates criticism of architectural education - working with real sites, constraints, budgets and briefs.

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

Give yourself strict time constraints and forget about winning. We see the process as an opportunity to communicate an idea concisely through the generation of an efficient workflow. It is a stark reality that for many practices, competition entries are an essential path towards recognition and security of work but this requires careful management. We aim to reach a point where our workflow is efficient and concise enough that our ideas can be drawn and communicated very quickly and effectively.