Georgian architects nominated for EU talent award

Works involving two Georgian creatives have been nominated for the Young Talent Architecture Award run by the  European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture, with Salome Gugunava and Nodar Kvanchiani picked among graduate nominees for the honour.

The two team projects involving the architects are among about 400 submissions from "some of the best architecture firms and institutions in Europe" (YTAA), with the two works in question submitted from the School of Architecture Urban Planning and Construction Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Milan.

The project involving Gugunava with  Jessica Martinez , Liu Jing  and Selcen Sozuneri presents a design proposal for a "deconstructed city" centre of Aleppo in Syria, aiming to illustrate "potentials and references" of the downtown location.

The project area is located in the deconstructed historical centre of Aleppo, Syria. The project aims to heal the interrupted permeability of the city [...] [outlining] the spatial relationship with the urban context by an articulation of architectonic spaces," a summary for the submission says.

In the design, the notion of traditional local life is combined with courtyards and entrance gates, while a concept of a "monumental public space" is brought into the mix to define an axis of elements through the area.

The project is submitted in the Urban Regeneration Masterplan category for YTAA nominations, addressing themes of cultural and social aggregation, civic centre in public space and more.

In a similar section of Urban Regeneration Building, a project by Nodar Kvanchiani and Hamed Jahanbaznejad proposes a Theatre Academy in Berlin, relating to the mixed use programme of Cultural and Social Compact.

It interprets the capital's morphological structure to reveal the "historic dimension" of the city through its layers found on the Museum Island area in the central district.

The Theatre Academy in Berlin represents the idea of theatre as a cultural phenomenon and as an urban space. The primary form of the building completes the compositional organisation of the post-war residential towers [and] interprets and carefully refers to the topographic assemblage of the northern edge" - summary of the project

The area for the venue is located at the southern edge of the Museum Island, a "strategic location" due to its role as the entrance to the central part of the capital city, its authors explain while introducing the relation of the project to structural body of the territory.

Nominated projects will be reviewed by judges of YTAA later this year, with selected works to be exhibited at the 2021 edition of the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Gugunava and Kvanchiani are recipients of the scholarship of the International Education Center, a Georgian state project supporting students seeking education opportunities abroad. Gugunava graduated from the Georgian Technical University with a bachelor's degree in architecture before her studies at the Polytechnic University of Milan, which she completed in 2018 with a master's degree.

Based between Barcelona, Milan and Tbilisi, Kvanchiani graduated from the Milan university with a master's in architecture, in the 2017/2018 class of the Architectural Design Studio. Beside the Theatre Academy design, his works include projects in Georgia and Russia.