Europan 10! – 10x Europan in The Netherlands – The Triade Housing Complex

by Emmie Vos

Europan has been organised ten times in The Netherlands. Almost 2,000 plans, produced by some 4,500 architects from home and abroad, were submitted for a total of 44 Dutch sites…. Right from the start in our country both architects, up to the age of forty, and municipalities as well as the commissioning parties were enthusiastic about the concept of this exceptional architecture competition. Though, for a number of years now, the term architecture no longer covers the scope of the competition. Urban development, the landscape and public space now play a role in the assignment,

What is Europan?

Europan 10! – 10x Europan asked previous completion winners what it means to win. Europan is a platform, a springboard, a network, assignments. It also leads to collaborations, friends, a laboratory, opportunities and possibly an own firm. For the Europan 8 winners, Floris Cornelisse and Robert Verrijt, winning the Europan has not yet led to a concrete building brief from the municipality. However the urban design that they made for Enschede,  sowed the seed for their start as independent architects in the Netherlands and India respectively. The design for the Europan project arose from a shared attitude to design and further clarified their thinking on architecture.

The Continuum of Public Space

The design was an attempt to find an answer to the question of how architecture defines the limits of public space.  How can public space adjust itself in the continuum of the environment? With hindsight, this recurring question is still relevant for the present projects of Happel Cornelisse Venhoeven Architecten and Architecture BRIO.