RUNNER UP

POST-SHOPPING

Project Description by Team: What if we analyze the urban ethos of Graz? What if we use the urban breeding ground of the city itself as a prototype for the site, as a recipe that orders the urban ingredients of a Prosumer-Oriented Shopping Mall?
The project is intended to be developed in time, constructing a series of infrastructural corridors that enable to inject Prosumer-oriented activities into CITYPARK. These Architectural Spines, these infrastructures, do not just allow the connection between both sides of the CITYPARK, but also introduce and articulate a series of complementary activities, hosted within architectural pieces, that hybridize de consumer Oriented ethos of the shopping mall with many other types of non-commercial programs. This strategy allows the CITYPARK to become a public active space for citizens, where production and consumption overlap.
Moreover, the new CITYPARK’s Living Room is more than a building, it becomes the core, the social heart of the wider masterplan for the City Park. And also, the urban gate that defines a transition, a migration from the domestic ethos of the surrounding area, to the commercial and public ethos of the New Post-Shopping CITYPARK.

Jury Statement: "[...The jury] appreciates the project as interesting for its scale and design. It solves the problem of the facade, the relationship to the church and it has a strong interface. It is not a modest thing, though. However, a certain urban intelligence is inscribed in the structural configuration which proposes a dialogue with the overall project, linking the site to the western edge of the development. The intervention is clearly overdone and programmed far too densely. Nevertheless, the concept of an ambitious reading of the urban potential, based in an intense dialogue between the EUROPAN site and the overall development area, remains as a quality to be respected and integrated in the future development. Thus, the proposal reflects a larger urban context, involving the important street at the other side of the shopping centre by linear infrastructures, with flexible plug-in programs that provide a future opportunity for connectivity. [...]”

Team Statement: "The site offers a unique context to rethink the roleof architects in the contemporary city by defining a critical framework from which to reinvent conventional architectural typologies, such as the Shopping-Mall, and to transform them into Social Condensers of cultural and economical innovation.
The project is nor a plaza nor a building but something in between. A place amid urbanism and architecture. A common framework for social gathering, cultural exchange and dialogue. The project stands as the transformation of the site into a Urban Living-Room that mediates the migration from „consumer-oriented“ practices into „prosumer-oriented“ ones."