The £10,000 RA Dorfman prize, given each year by the Royal Academy of Arts in London, is broad in its aims and global in its ambition. It “champions new talent”, from anywhere in the world, found with the help of 150 nominators and judged by a panel of academicians. The prize takes into consideration “geographical and sociopolitical challenges”. Its winners don’t have to be especially young. Rather, says the RA’s head of architecture, Vicky Richardson, it is “really good at finding people who have been building away, working like mad, without promoting themselves internationally”.
The prize risks being too general for its own good, but it has a knack for spotting individuals and groups who expand what architecture can do. Past winners include Boonserm Premthada in 2019, whose Bangkok Project Studio combines crafts and modern materials to produce arresting, original, never-seen-before structures that nonetheless make an unexpected kind of sense. The works of this year’s shortlist of four include restored Berber granaries, a proposed concrete-and-timber tower intended to last 500 years, a communist underwear factory converted into a home, and war-hit houses reroofed at speed. Their common themes include the desire to work collaboratively, a belief in reusing existing structures wherever possible, and a tendency to push conventional definitions of architectural practice so far that it’s hard to say exactly what they are.
One of the shortlisted groups, Livyj Bereh, is a volunteer organisation that contains no architects. It is the creation of three thirtysomething friends from Kyiv – a construction manager and art collector, a florist and designer, and a multimedia artist – who responded within weeks to the Russian invasion of their country by setting about repairing bombed-out homes. Their speciality is putting on roofs of corrugated metal – 380 so far – with a combination of their own and local labour, so as to bring “tangible relief” and “a semblance of normalcy”. “We give hope to people,” they told the Irish Times, “and they believe that somebody cares about them. They call their sons on the frontline and say: ‘The roof is not leaking.’ It’s the best energy.”
Livyj Bereh (which means “left bank”, in reference to the more contested side of the Dnipro River) also document the places they help and the work they do, in exhibitions abroad and with haunting, precisely observed images which they post on Instagram. They are creating an archive, as they put it, of “the peculiar features of architecture and everyday life”. Their work therefore strives to be as practical as can be, while also raising awareness of the “local distinctive culture” that is “endangered due to the impact of war”.
Salima Naji is an architect and anthropologist who encourages and revives construction techniques such as rammed earth and stone masonry in her native Morocco, which use materials that are close to hand and protect their inhabitants from heat with a minimum of energy. She restores historic buildings, including Berber communal granaries in the south of the country – fortified structures whose curving, vase-like forms follow the unpredictable contours of the rocky outcrops on which they are built. She designs new buildings with similar techniques, such as a maternity centre in the town of Tissint. In Agadir she restored its old citadel, laid out new walkways that follow the lines of streets destroyed in the city’s devastating 1960 earthquake, and designed a new visitor centre.
Naji did not personally rediscover traditional building methods – she cites the influence of the Egyptian Hassan Fathy, who used them in the mid-20th century – but she has battled to overcome the preference of construction companies and public authorities for using reinforced concrete. She has helped to build up local expertise in the places where she works, which is in turn passed on to younger builders. The built results are not exercises in reviving historic styles, but new works with graceful geometries and details, such as ceilings with diamond grids of overlapping timbers, and – with the Agadir visitor centre – walls made of staggered patterns of wooden beams and drystone, the better to withstand future earthquakes.
B+, a Berlin-based co-operative practice, engages with a different kind of history. Their office and workshop is in a high concrete silo, part of a former factory in an outer suburb of what was East Berlin, where they are hoping to realise a larger urban development project. Their other works include a weekend villa carved out of the Ernst Lück lingerie factory, a GDR relic in Potsdam, now a brutalist cave with rough-as-you-like openings hacked out of its concrete walls.
These spaces look like powerful expressions of personal taste, but they are also intended as statements of wider attitudes that B+ simultaneously pursue through activist means. They set up HouseEurope!, an initiative that aims to promote “a new value system in architecture” and “a virtuous construction industry” that renovates rather than demolishes existing buildings. The latter approach, it claims, is “as outdated as food waste, fast fashion and single-use plastics”.
Ten, a group based in Belgrade and Zurich, describes itself as “an architecture, design and research association” that acts like a record label, allowing “interdependent work groups” to realise their ideas. Its projects include publications and exhibitions as well has the design of buildings. Their Avala House is a spare, refined box in glass and skinny black steel, poised above a slope near Belgrade using only everyday materials and locally available skills.
They have proposed a tower of cooperative housing in Berne with a partly concrete structure designed to last 500 years, within which timber elements can be swapped around over shorter lifespans, in response to changing needs. Like most of their projects it combines intellectual and constructional elegance and invention, in pursuit of highly desirable ends.
Taken as a whole, the Dorfman shortlist address a range of necessities, from the desperate need of Ukrainians for roofs over their heads to the less urgent requirement for a weekend home. There might conceivably be some attention-seeking in among the seriousness of the shared aims, but it’s beyond the scope of the prize, or this article, fully to judge the relative effectiveness of the approaches on offer, and the choice of winner – to be announced at the Royal Academy on 31 October – won’t be scientific. “It’s hard to judge architecture by spreadsheet,” as Richardson says. But the process displays a heartening and widespread ambition to use architectural skills to do good in the world, to do so in collaboration with others, with a certain amount of style and beauty.
