First Prize
Frank Bayh & Steff Rosenberger-Ochs, Germany
“Developing new neighbourhoods at the heart of the city” was a promotional slogan for the controversial “Stuttgart 21” project. Strolling through Schlossgarten Park in the autumn of 2010, one could see that this process had already begun: provoked by the project, but not a result of its realization, a tent city had been set up by protesters. The series “Die Entwicklung neuer Stadtquartiere im Herzen der City” is meant as a tribute to this extraordinary, inventive, but temporary architecture. F. B. & S. R.-O.
Prize
Stanislaw Chomicki, Germany
More than any other German city, Frankfurt’s skyline is marked by high-rise architecture. Since the 1950s, the cityscape has been constantly changing and continues to draw attention as both brand and landmark: skyscrapers as an expression of progression, economic power and social status. The “Towers” project was shot in 2012 with a pinhole camera – a technique seemingly at odds with all this. The discrepancy between old and new gives the motifs a distinctive voice, their special appeal based on overexposure and blurring. S. C.
Prize
Nadia Pugliese, Italy
Kidron Valley Project – The Kidron Valley is located in the eastern part of the old city of Jerusalem, it is one of the most sacred places for the three main monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam. According to a passage in the Bible this area corresponds to the Valley of Jehoshaphat, the place where God will gather all the people for final judgement. Over the centuries it has become a huge funeral complex, now divided into three sections for each religious cult. Direct reflection of the political and social conflicts that affect this territory, this valley is also a disputed land, a city of the dead that suffers the same struggles of the living. N. P.
Highly Recommended
Enrico Duddeck,Germany
Federal Energy Capital: Striving to create a consensus between humankind and nature that does justice to both sides has become an elementary task of our society – a task which in the past was not considered of existential importance. Grevenbroich has the largest single deposit of lignite in Europe. The coal-fired power stations at Frimmersdorf and Neurath, where some of the lignite is burned to make electricity, lie within the city limits. According to the European Pollutant Emission Register, this area is one of the dirtiest in Europe. The power stations are omnipresent, dominating the living environment like no other architecture before them. E. D.
Olaf Rößler, Germany
black as pitch – In these night shots inspired by Romantic painters, the architecture rises up out of deep blackness in subtle colours. Their aesthetic recalls Lars von Trier’s cinematic universe. And they invite the viewer to come on a nocturnal journey based on personal memories. The series was shot in a part of Germany marked by strong structural change. Studies assume that in 20 years, some settlements in the Lausitz region will have zero population. This sheds light on a topical worldwide phenomenon: for the first time in human history, the urban population is larger than the rural population. O. R.
Jörg Winde, Germany
Mayoral offices in Germany – These precisely composed views of mayoral offices taken in towns across the country between 2005 and 2012 offer a cross section of German office culture. The pictures are historical documents providing information about the formal sensibilities and self-portrayals of the people who run our municipalities, and about their attitudes to tradition and vision. The result is a typology of the office, an insight into spaces between public representation and personal taste. J. W.
Commendation
Christoph Karl Banski,Germany
The “Vastus” series documents the face of the communities currently undergoing relocation on the periphery of the Garzweiler II opencast lignite mine. Most of the inhabitants have already left. Only buildings and infrastructure remain as silent witnesses to the departed people. On the surface, the face of the settlements is altered by vandalism and ongoing decay. But the former individual character of each place can still be recognized and will only disappear when everything is demolished. The title “Vastus” is from the Latin (as seen in words like “devastation”) and means “desolate” or “empty” …. C. K. B.
Theodor Barth,Germany
On my travels through Libya, I met the former electrician Jamal Mansour in Sirte. He had previously worked at the Ouagadougou Conference Center and gave me a tour of the building. Muammar Gaddafi intended the OCC to underpin his vision of an African Union, using it to receive state guests and hold conferences. Sirte was to be the capital of Africa. During the civil war, the complex was completely destroyed. My work shows the importance of architecture in underpinning claims to power, as well as the importance of destroying such buildings in times of war. T. B.
Akos Czigany, Hungary
In “Skies” (homage à Hiroshi Sugimoto), my camera directs the viewer’s eyes from the courtyards of apartment houses up to the sky. The series implies a vertical dialogue between earth and heaven, paying homage to Theaters by Hiroshi Sugimoto.“In the spirit of Constructivism and the Bauhaus, in the wake of Rodtchenko, Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, Kertesz and even Lucien Hervé, he devotes himself to bestowing on his photographs their primary meaning, namely 'writing with light', an approach both conceptual and documentary, compositions with purified lines, in majestic black and white, resulting in images that merge serenity and drama, suspended time, light and space.” (Gilles de Bure, art critic). A. C.
Anna Domnick, Germany
honeycombs – When Halle-Neustadt was built in the 1960s to create abundant accommodation for the workforce of two neighbouring energy producers, it was the largest construction project in East Germany. By the early 1980s, more than 90,000 people lived in the city. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the East German political system made a dramatic impact on Halle-Neustadt, which has lost more than half of its inhabitants. While the number of empty dwellings continues to rise, the city hovers between presence and absence. Four of the five apartment blocks that were once the city’s emblem have been empty since the early 1990s. While the “beehive” broke apart, the houses gradually began to conserve the remains of the once ideal Communist city. A. D.
Florian Huth, Germany
Sex sells. Since it inception, the advertising industry has used this fact to court the attention of potential customers. The discrepancy between the perfect world of advertising and the surrounding real world is the starting point for the series “Women In Public Space”. Without written messages to place the pictures in a clear context, what the posters say is pushed in a different direction, creating a new relationship between images of women and the built environment. Urban space evades precise interpretation, giving rise to surreal situations in familiar settings. F. H.
Tsang Ka Wai (EasonPage), Hong Kong
landmark – In this densely populated city, buildings move vertically up toward the sky. On these vertically extending planes, I found the hidden new landmarks of the city. T. K. W.
Thorsten Klapsch, Germany
In 2005, prompted by a heated political and ecological debate, I began to take photographs documenting all of Germany’s nuclear power stations and almost every other aspect of the country’s nuclear activities, from research through to waste storage and dismantling. First from outside, and then, from early 2011, from inside too, when, even before the nuclear disaster in Japan and the resulting new energy policy in Germany, I was given access to restricted zones and their control facilities. Since then, I have documented the utopia of an industry whose end seems assured but that will continue to be a concern to future generations. T. K.
Bertram Kober, Germany
On international journeys, Bertram Kober photographs the transmitter masts and reception equipment presented in “Transmission”. As well as monumentality and a sculptural aesthetic, the pictures shot in the Italian mountains, the Arabian desert or the German plains refer to the omnipresence of a seamless network, a blanket of waves used to send, receive, monitor and relay anything and everything. Information is accessible, everywhere, and so are we. The idyll of a landscape comes across as untouched. Only the docking stations for transmission and amplification are identifiable. Kober stages them impressively.
Christine D. Hölzig
Sebastian Lang, Germany
behaviour scan – The photographs show a series of similar-looking houses in the town of Haßloch in the Palatinate region, the most average place in Germany according to the Society for Consumer Research (GfK). “In a reality controlled by GfK staff” the buying habits of the townspeople dictate which products will be stocked by supermarkets across the country. This raises the question of whether or not “victims are being proclaimed judges” (Adorno). The standardized framing, the strange lighting, and the visible grain unsettle habitual strategies of decoding. The deserted pictures look like a stage-set, like a dummy. S. L.
Joel Micah Miller, Germany
Monumental – How do people act when they visit famous places? Are they thrilled by the architecture or does it take a back seat to the all important snapshot proving – to their social media friends and otherwise – that they were “there”?
Photographed in metropolises in Europe and the United States, “Monumental” analysis what happens or could happen in a popular space over a short period of time.
The high profile locations were chosen for their iconic level of recognition and number of eager visitors. J. M. M.
J. Ramón Moreno, Spain
Oscar Niemeyer described the Niemeyer Center (Avilés, Spain) as an open square to the humankind, a place for education, culture and peace. The economic crisis and incompetence of the political staff in regional government has lead this project to be closed in December 2011, ten months after their inauguration. Spain is the country where the houses are empty and people have no home, where nonsense political decisions have constructed airports with no planes and all the cities have wished an emblematic building, their particular Guggenheim, without no respect for the cost, or the people. Only the press of citizens movements has achieved finally relaunch the NCA. J. R. M.
Daniel Müller Jansen, Germany
The Ruhr Valley has become synonymous with a region shaped by industry. We know how this region is constituted and what it feels like. In my work, I bring together two different urban landscapes: industrial complexes and housing projects. Presenting this content in two layers permits a direct comparison between industrial and residential architecture. In the composition, industry appears diffuse and misty in the background, with the houses more real and with fuller colours in the foreground: industry becomes an abstract phenomenon, a staged apparition, a vague memory. D. M. J.
Monika Nguyen, Austria
Used, Istanbul 2012 – Istanbul’s wooden houses, only very few of which still exist, were built in the Ottoman period of the late 19th century. At this time, they were inhabited mainly by wealthy people – today, most are in a wretched state and are inhabited above all by migrants from Anatolia. Istanbul abandoned the old wooden architecture to decay, until the city was almost stripped of its UNESCO Cultural Heritage status. Today, the houses are being painstakingly restored. M. N.
Armano Perna, Italy
A3, Salerno-Reggio Calabria – The series is a part of a work on the A3 Salerno – Reggio Calabria highway, the greatest infrastructural work ever realised in Italy. In 1964 the Italian Government decided to realise a highway to connect Calabria, the „third Italian Island“, to the rest of the country. At the end of the works the conditions of the highway were so far from the regulations of the European legislation that was necessary to start a modernisation process.
The works are still going on, especially cause of the infiltration of the calabrian mafia, the “Ndrangheta”, in the construction sites. In 2012 the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia) discovered that more of 12 “families” were involved in the public works.
In 2013 358 (of 494) km are going to be completed. A. P.
Christof Plümacher, Germany
The blurry pictures in the “Cognoscere” series take their cue from Hermann Rein and Max Schneider’s book “Einführung in die Psychologie des Menschen” (Introduction to Human Psychology, 1964). The authors describe the process of human cognition as the creation of a model of one’s environment using one’s senses, mainly by comparing with a previously learned pattern. The works on show here are the result of looking beyond the concrete photography that documents and surrounds us. With pictures whose outlines and colours are still decipherable, the series is a first step towards an aesthetic of abstraction. The series also has a topical dimension, symbolizing major axes of current affairs: Berlin–Paris, the church, and Brussels. C. P.
Nicolai Rapp, Germany
accumulation – The United Nations has rightly dubbed the 21st century “The Century of the City”. Since 2008, for the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. In Africa, the increase in urbanization (for the period 2005-2010) is the highest in the world at 3.4 percent. In sub-Saharan Africa, urbanization is synonymous with the growth of slums. (Source: German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development, report on “Urbanization in Africa”). “accumulation” examines the architectural structures of improvised slum dwellings, as well as death and hope. Lack of orientation spreads, leaving us with a feeling of “bring lost”. N. R.
Stephan Sasek, Germany
Thuja occidentalis – The aesthetic model of prefabrication and imitation that has shaped modern urban spaces has had a striking impact on the appearance of nature in towns, as they become cultural landscapes subject to permanent change by human hand. This is exemplified in my work by the thujas, a group of plants in the cypress family that are used in all western cultures as decorative and hedge plants in gardens, parks and urban landscapes. S. S.
Simon Schnepp & Morgane Renou (schnepp-renou), Germany
These pictures are taken from the series “Les Grands Ensembles” taken in 2011 and 2012 in the suburbs or Paris. The featured housing projects were built in the 1970s to provide accommodation to cope with projected population growth for the Paris region. When these predictions proved inaccurate, most of the buildings were given over to social housing. Originally conceived as forward-looking model architecture in the suburbs of France’s capital, in the early 1980s these neighbourhoods developed into social trouble-spots. S. S. & M. R.
Rainer Sioda, Germany
These pictures are taken from the “Stay Home Young Man” series”, part of a long-term project entitled “MARK” that examines current socioeconomic developments in the federal state of Brandenburg. The focus is on the overlapping and layering of infrastructural, architectural structures and forms of expression in everyday culture. Demographic studies predict that by 2030, Brandenburg will lose roughly a third of its population. Those moving away include a particularly high percentage of well educated young women. This corresponds to a larger number of often poorly educated young men who stay behind. That is the subject of the series. R. S.
Anna Thiele, Germany
Berlin-Tempelhof, Metamorphose l – A disused airfield in the middle of Berlin that is now taking on a new life having been turned over to the public. A space not yet defined by town planners that is being reclaimed by nature and by the population. I find this fascinating. Since the summer of 2010, I have been exploring this intermediate state with my camera. Every time I visit, I am surprised by a different scenario – emptiness, commotion, monocyclists, kite flyers, lonely joggers. In this series, I would like to give expression to these dramatic moments and the gradual transformation of the place: the (camera) position is always the same, what happens in the picture incomparable. Tempelhof is pure change: a place that has lost its purpose and that is looking for a new one. A. T.
Christoph von Haussen, Germany
Looking down from above concentrates and bundles all human creation. An overview offers more insight! That is what makes aerial pictures so fascinating. The impressions change by the minute. Construction sites give way to natural landscapes, autobahn intersections morph into social housing, prison complexes turn into boundless expanses. Flying overhead, the familiar is discovered afresh. C. v. H.
Marc Wollmann, Germany
gerade gebogen – This work deals with the river architecture of the Emscher region. Striking a balance between documentation of a disappearing local phenomenon and photographic interpretation of phenomena with a purely functional design. The development and man-made progress that once made these structures necessary now make them unnecessary and unwanted. “Nature forces humans towards architecture, humans conquer nature using architecture, humans remove architecture and want a piece of nature back” – an imagined three-phase model informing this work. M. W.