On 4 and 5 March the first meeting of the Advisory Committee of the European Prize for Urban Public Space was held at the CCCB. The Board for this year’s award consists of ten European institutions working in the domains of architecture and urban planning.
Present at the meeting were Fabrizio Gallanti, director of Arc en Rêve (Bordeaux), Francis Rambert, director of the Institut Français d’Architecture (Paris), Ellis Woodman, director of the Architecture Foundation (London), Peter Schmaltz, director of the Deutsches ArchitektureMuseum (Frankfurt), Katharina Ritter, curator at the Architerkturzentrum (Vienna), James Taylor-Foster, curator at Arkdes (Stockholm), Nicolaus Hirsch, director of CIVA (Brussels), Triin Ojari, director of the Estonian Museum of Architecture (Tallin), Samu Szmerey, director of Contents at the KÉK (Budapest), and Bogo Zupancic, director of the Museum of Architecture and Design (Ljubljana).
The main role of the Advisory Committee is to ensure that all European public space projects carried out between 2018 and 2021 are known to the Prize organisers and, conversely, that architects and promotors of good public space projects are informed about the award and encouraged to present their work. The Advisory Committee is, then, a group that directly contributed to the variety and richness of the initiative.
About the meeting
At the first meeting, agreement was reached concerning the start (on 20 April) of the call for entries in this year’s award, and ideas were shared about the best ways of making the Prize known throughout Europe. A good part of the session was devoted to reviewing the 250 public space projects nominated by the Prize’s network of experts so that the architects and sponsors concerned can be invited by the organisers to present for the Prize. Moreover, the institutions of the advisory board contributed with their own suggestions of projects that are of interest to the Prize but that had not been nominated.
The second day’s meeting was devoted to a visit, led by Ariadna Miquel, director of the City Council’s Urban Strategy, to one of Barcelona’s most significant areas in terms of Barcelona’s urban transformation, namely la Plaça de les Glòries. The board members also visited the Poblenou superblock, a project that received a Special Mention in the 2018 European Prize for Urban Public Space. The day concluded with a tour of the Sala Beckett theatre led by the architects Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, whose renovation of the building has received considerable international acclaim.
