aed neuland 2013: Awards Ceremony and Exhibition.

“How did the elephant get its trunk?”

“How do you get concrete and mortar on to the upper floors of buildings?

While you don’t need to know the answer to the first question to answer the second: if the elephant didn’t, the answer to the second would be a lot less convenient than the modern reality.

The idea of using a trunk-esque system to transport concrete and mortar to higher floors was developed by the Stuttgart engineer Karl Schlecht in his 1957 diploma project at Stuttgart University. And has gone on to become the globally accepted industry standard.

Just one of those examples of Stuttgart design revolutionising our world.

It is therefore more than fitting that the Karl Schlecht Trust should be principle sponsor of the aed neuland award: it is after all a competition for diploma, bachelor and similar students projects.

Organised by the Verein zur Förderung von Architektur, Engineering und Design in Stuttgart e.V, or aed Stuttgart for short, the neuland competition was first staged in 2005 and is an international competition open to students and graduates under 28.

For the 4th edition the organisers received over 200 entries for the five competition categories, and on Wednesday October 16th 2013 the five category winners were unveiled, and the accompanying exhibition featuring the winners and the 17 nominated projects officially opened.

It will come as a surprise to no-one to hear that our principle attention was devoted to the category Industrial and Product Design.

What impressed us was the fundamental nature of the research involved in many of the projects. There wasn’t, for example, a single chair or bookcase to be seen.
OK as a competition for student projects one could have expected such. That it was then actually so was a real joy to behold.
And of course where one has research based projects one often has uses beyond the original.

The winning project Wanderer by Pietro Huber and Marc-André Brucker from the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd, for example, is a kayak that can be rolled flat and so transported in your boot and carried as a rucksack. A product which means that anyone wanting to explore the great outdoors with more seriousness than than the Brasher boot wearing hoards who pummel the vales, hills and daffodils of the English Lake District can now do so on land and water with equal ease.

That the vast majority of us don’t want to do that is clear. However the technology needn’t only be used in the outdoor pursuits industry. Your leisure may be as Spud so beautifully phrased it “my pleasure”, but equally “Your leisure craft is our rescue route”, in that the research and technology can, presumably, be used to develop objects to help humanitarian organisations get help to where it is needed, especially after natural catastrophes in remote regions. Or indeed just to get a lot of boats to flooded cities with minimal effort.

Similarly applicable for both leisure and catastrophe is the project TiPi by Fachhochschule Kaiserslautern graduate Jens Betha. Or at least on paper. We haven’t seen anything physical, and so can’t confirm in how far it meets its description. But assuming it does TiPi is a flat-pack, modular accommodation system that provides the basics required for a few days safe and comfortable living in a series of easily transportable elements.  And although officially positioned as a solution for camping, its application as emergency housing would appear to be a fairly easy extension.

A further project that caught our attention on account of the nature of the research behind the glossy photos and renderings was the caravan project Beyond by Markus Kurkowski from the Hochschule Darmstadt, winner in the category Mobility and Transport Design. Developed to meet the requirements of the disabled/physically impaired, we’re not 100% convinced that the caravan presented in the project can actually work in an affordable and sustainable fashion. But that’s not the point. What’s important is the elemental research undertaken into questions of what is wrong with conventional caravans from the perspective of disabled/physically impaired users, and how one can solve these. Because such problems are almost certainly never solely problems in caravans but also in other spaces. The caravan can as such be seen as an experimental laboratory. Which is of course similar to how Georg Vrachliotis explained Fritz Haller‘s plans for a space colony “…in principle Fritz Haller went to space to be able to think better about earth” Markus Kurkowski went into a caravan.

Elsewhere other notable mentions from us go to Learning from Architecture, 7 Mahnungen by Tobias Keinath, category winner Communication and Graphic Design; The Kings New Clothes, a washing machine that uses co2 rather than water developed by Philipp Oster; and Flyscraper by Kassel University graduates Stefan Niggemeyer and Ernesto M. Mulch. Even if we will need a lot more time to properly grasp all that is contained in the project.

Karl Schlecht’s original diploma project has over the intervening decades transformed itself into one of those multi-million Euro family businesses that in many ways define the core of the economy in Stuttgart and environs: those multi-million Euro family businesses who are also one of the reasons why Stuttgart is home to such a disproportionately large number of architects and designers. There is work for them.

If any of the aed neuland 2013 projects will also be such global successes remains of course to be seen. But the potential is definitely there. We hope the designers and architects involved are given the chance to try.

The exhibition of all nominated and winning aed neuland 2013 projects can be viewed at Galerie Klaus Gerrit Friese Waldbaur-Areal, Rotebühlstraße 87, 70178 Stuttgart until Friday November 8th. The organisers are then planning to send it on tour, exact details are as yet not confirmed, we will however keep you informed.

Below some impressions from the awards ceremony and some of the winning projects. A gallery of exhibition images can be found at facebook.com/smow.stuttgart