DBEW 2002 The Judging Results Announcement

[comments in general]

K: Among 520 design works, each jury selected 15 pieces. The four juries stick their names onto the selected 15 pieces among 520 design works. The total of all the juries’ choices was a little over 30 pieces in total. After much discussion, the juries reduced them to 29. The juries agreed to make choices among the 29. Afterwards, among 15 selected choices, 4 golden prize winners candidates were selected. Originally it had to be 3 candidates among which one was to be the Grand Prix winning work. However, 4 were selected, and for 3 whole hours, the juries could not decide on which to drop. An intense discussion took place, and finally the juries agreed that they leave all the 4 pieces as candidates of the Golden Prize and select one piece as the Grand Prix winner.

One regretful incident was that Mr. Arata Isozaki who attended as jury last year was not able to attend due to his sudden participation at a certain development plan himself. We will ask for his comments afterwards.

Unlike our expectation, there were many design pieces which were experimental, declarative and conceptual. And the other half were very aesthetic and design oriented, some even covering the world of poetry.

As Mr. Mendini declared several times during screening, “The essence of design is language”
In other words, poetic side is of upmost importance in design. The question is when it concretely reaches the stage of aesthetic side, can it still be considered a design - we can see in two different ways.

One flow that seemed to us like a problem is that there was a little mixture of category A and B. Category A was to make a floor plan of an apartment and category B was making a choice of the apartment and decorating the interior; but realistically making the choice was indeed doing the design itself, and in some cases lots of changes were made, so it was categorized.
The Golden Prize winner was Category B, Interior Design. However some juries thought there was a certain restriction in design since the plan was already given and it was not appropriate. But it is given identically to everyone and it was their choice, so there were a little disputes among juries. Furthermore, in Category C, furniture or equipment design, there were not many works applied, and among the applied works, no outstanding work which well met the subject was noted; therefore none from this category was able to win any prize. This is indeed very regrettable.

Mendini :
Well in general, I found a very good standard of the quality of all entrances in this
competition. Some are students and some are professionals and the quality is very, very
good and I think better than last year. So we can say that the second step is very positive.
They show us they are very connected with international culture of the language of
architecture and design. Some of the projects were more utopic and some more realistic, so
we can combine two different mentalities. But generally speaking, all the group of the works
show us all kinds of languages that now are in our field in the world.

Pei :
On the competition, I'd like to simply say in the beginning, what has been already said this
morning, that I think the competition this year has matured very well over last year. And I
think that there has been some real advantage in the continuity of the judges overseeing two
successive years of competition entries, in order to assess and to hopefully make
recommendations for the continual improvement of this competition. I think that this year we
saw the competition participants represent broader spectrum of the design, professionals
and as wells as students. But I think this year we saw more entries originating from schools
as well as offices, and professional practices. And this raised the bar, raised the standard of
the competition entries. And I think it well for future of this competition which I think is
extremely important.