Online architecture platform Blank Space has announced the recipients of its 2020 Fairy Tale Awards, selecting three prize winners and 11 honorable mentions from submissions from more than 65 countries. This year’s awardees were chosen by a panel of 20 architects, designers, and storytellers including Alison Brooks, principal and creative director of Alison Brooks Architects in London; Marc Tsurumaki, AIA, principal at LTL Architects in New York; Jenny Wu and Dwayne Oyler, founding partners of the Oyler Wu Collaborative in Los Angeles; Mecky Reuss and Ana Paula Ruiz Galindo, founding partners of Pedro y Juana in Mexico City; and Manuelle Gautrand, principal architect of Manuelle Gautrand Architecture in Paris.
“As our actual lives have become increasingly surreal these stories' engagement of both the inherent darkness and optimism of the fairy tale became particularly resonant," Tsurumaki said in a Blank Space press release.
Previous winners of the competition, which is in its seventh year, have developed their submissions into films, exhibitions, and comic books.
The recipients of the 2020 Fairy Tale Awards are:
First Place: Tamás Fischer and Carlotta Cominetti of VIRGINLEMON for “The Year Without a Winter”From the designers: “We wrote our story thinking about the moment when the world has to stop and people have to change their habits to avoid the collapse and to protect themselves from an unfamiliar event, like a very strong and sudden climate change. We now realise how our story can look like the situation the world is experiencing today: waiting, boredom, loneliness, regrets, social media as the only way out. But what we really wanted to highlight is how emergency situations can lead to a real turning point. Difficult situations lead people to think more and use their creativity differently. Since this pandemic started we have been talking about a life changing event, which is exactly the subject of our story. Our lives will change, but for the better.”
Second Place: Aleksandr Čebotariov and Laura Kuršvietytė for “SYMBIOSIS”From the designers: “Our fairytale is a naive attempt to address the issue of different kinds of crises we are experiencing - not only ecological, but social and existential as well. In the routine of everyday life, based on capitalism, we tend to lose ourselves to our jobs, our forests to fields and commerce. We forget our capabilities, such as senses, of our natural organisms, and many other things. We were mostly inspired by The Swamp School, a Lithuanian pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale, where we volunteered, its creators Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonai, and after that living in an urban environment of Brussels stimulated our thoughts, collected in Venice.”
Third Place: Albert Orozco and Edward Rivero for “Lloronas of Juárez”From the designers: ““Lloronas of Juarez” is a narrative of the ongoing violence against migrants, specifically women and children, that is enacted through national borders by settler-colonial states. Through an intersectional analysis, we leverage protest art, historical narrative, and landscape urbanism to re-imagine what the ecologies around the Mexico/U.S. border can become if we move toward more relational ways of connecting to the land. Specifically, our project critiques racist immigration policies, gendered ideologies, and xenophobic logics that converge in the design and construction of borders and prisons. We call attention to the urgency of abolishing detention centers that imprison migrant communities throughout the United States through a story of struggle and resistance portrayed by the protagonists of the story. We hope to dream in solidarity with migrants, immigrant rights activists, critical scholars, artists, designers, as well as other community organizers, who continue to resist empire-building toward the development of a future without borders.”
Honorable Mentions:
Diego Grisaleña Albéniz and James Mitchell for “H.A.N.D, I DO”
Amit Avni for “Back to Eden”
Anton Markus Pasing of Remote Controlled Studio for “USO-03 unit A_Upstream Strategic Outposts”
Eric & Eva de Broche des Combes for “7121 Lonzo”
Liang Jiawei and Wu wei for “Ghostly Presence”
Marie Walker-Smith for “Rothiemurchus 2098”
Ioanna Sotiriou & Maria Tsilogianni for “Mickey’s Mechanical House”
Therese Leick and Wilhelm Scheruebl for “Breath”
Stefano Stecchelli, Carlo Occhipinti, Ilaria Caraffi, Francesco Bacci, and Carlo Canepa of To Nowhere Studio for “Post-reality framework”
Lindsay Harkema, AIA, for “Active Ornament”
Suada Dema for “Purgatory”
