Architecture competition Ugandan LGBT Youth Asylum 2nd prize winners - Guilherme Pardini, João Paulo Carrascoza, Julia Park and Marcelo Venzon

We’d like to take this opportunity to introduce the 2nd prize winners of our Ugandan LGBT Youth Asylum competition - Guilherme Pardini, João Paulo Carrascoza, Julia Park and Marcelo Venzon from Brazil!

2nd prize winners: Guilherme Pardini, João Paulo Carrascoza, Julia Park and Marcelo Venzon from BrazilWe met at university, Escola da Cidade, where Guilherme Pardini and João Paulo Carrascoza graduated from last year and Julia Park and Marcelo Venzon are still studying. We’ve already participated in other competitions and projects together, so we knew the workflow would be positive.

The scale of our work varies a lot. We did a lot of school projects which had an urbanistic approach, dealing with complex and fragile social, ecological and urban issues. Others were more detailed and technical like thinking in an alternative infrastructure system for the streets in São Paulo, and now we’re actually more involved in material investigation, questioning its tectonics both in an academic field and personal projects.

Our working field can easily position us into thinking in a democratic way. We should act by planning cities and designing public and private spaces which allow pro-active behavior towards that way of thinking. In our current situation in Brazil we find ourselves in a political crisis, struggling with the right to democracy. In that way, architecture is an important tool to guarantee those rights through designing spaces where freedom of speech and equal rights are common ground.

Why do you participate in architecture vision competitions? 

The proposal of the Uganda LGBT Asylum competition caught our attention because it was addressing a very polemical theme where the matters discussed before were threatened. We felt the importance to discuss those matters and combining it in a way that would directly relate to the design of this building. So we thought it would be fun and interesting to do a competition together and try an experiment which we didn’t had much expertise in, like our investigation in tensile structures in this case. We find it very important to keep exercising our discussions outside of academia and office environments.

Architecture vision competitions are an important way to test and learn new abilities, as well as exercise exchange of knowledge between the participants.