Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos awarded the First Prize in the International Architectural Competition for the Archive of the Avant-garde of the Marzona Collection in Dresden (Germany).
05/02/2018
Autor: Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos
The jury of the international competition for the Archive of the Avant-garde (Archiv der Avantgarden der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen) has awarded the First Prize to the project by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos (Madrid-Berlin).
Copyright: Foto ©2018 Nieto Sobejano. Description: Archiv der Avantgarde, Interior view.
The contest was promoted by the Land of Saxony in order to rehabilitate and extend the historic Baroque building of the Blockhaus to house the valuable archive donated by the German-Italian collector Egidio Marzona. Nieto Sobejano's proposal was chosen as the winner among 28 other finalists, after a previous selection of 103 European architects. The second and third place were awarded to the projects of Schulz & Schulz and Wandel Lorch, while honorary mentions were given to Diener & Diener, Rohdecan and Riegler Riewe.
The Blockhaus is one of the most significant buildings in the historic center of the German city located on the banks of the Elbe River. Initially built in 1732, it underwent multiple transformations over time, fundamentally after the Second World War. The project, with an area of 2,000 m2 and a total investment of € 20 million, responds to the desire to open the archive to visitors, specialists and the public in general. The newly accessible archive of valuable and heterogeneous legacy includes works of art, objects, drawings, plans and furniture of the different artistic currents that constituted the vanguards in the field of art and architecture: Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, and represented by institutions such as the Werkbund, the Bauhaus, the HfG Ulm or the Black Mountain College.
The winning project by Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos arises from a dialogue between memory and the avant-garde, represented by the building and its collection, which translates into the insertion of a suspended cube containing the archive that frees the entire ground floor as a flexible space for public meeting, exhibitions, workshops and conferences. In the words of the jury, chaired by the architect Arno Lederer: "The subtle provocation and the mental game that the institutional name implies is understood as the starting point in this project: a massive concrete volume that floats in the void of the empty Blockhaus forms the centerpiece of the archive, a hidden treasure, like the inevitable presence of the past ".
Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos was founded by Fuensanta Nieto and Enrique Sobejano and has offices in Madrid and Berlin. Along with being widely published in international magazines and books, the firm’s work has been exhibited at the Biennale di Venezia in 2000, 2002, 2006, and 2012, at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 2006, at the Kunsthaus in Graz in 2008 and at the MAST Foundation in Bologna, Italy in 2014. They are the recipients of the 2008 National Prize for Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Heritage and the 2010 Nike Prize issued by the Bund Deutscher Architekten (BDA), as well as the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2010, the Piranesi Prix de Rome in 2011, the European Museum of the Year Award (2012), the Hannes Meyer Prize (2012), the Alvar Aalto Medal (2015) and the Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts (Spain 2017). Their major works include the Madinat al-Zahra Museum, the Moritzburg Museum in Halle, the San Telmo Museum in San Sebastián, the Joanneum extension in Graz, and the Contemporary Art Centre in Córdoba. Nieto Sobejano Arquitectos is currently working on cultural projects in several countries, among them, the extension of the Archaeologische Staatssammlung in Munich (Germany), the extension of the Museo Sorolla in Madrid (Spain) and the Arvo Pärt Centre in Laulasmaa (Estonia) which will be inaugurated in 2018. Three monographs have been recently published on their work: "Nieto Sobejano. Memory and Invention" (Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, Germany, 2013), "Fuensanta Nieto, Enrique Sobejano. Architetture" (Mondadori Electa Spa, Milano, Italy, 2014) and "Nieto Sobejano Arquitectura 2004-2017" (TC Cuadernos 131/132, Valencia, Spain, 2017).
Links: Nieto Sobejano http://www.nietosobejano.com
X