Fairy Tales 2015

Blank Space announces the winners of the 2015 Fairy Tales competition, that challenged participants to produce architectural projects accompanied by fictional stories.

On March 17 the jury – composed by Anish Kapoor, Paola Antonelli, Juergen Mayer, Jaime Derringer, Andy Hunter, Karim Rashid, Yves Behar, John Hoke, Shohei Shigematsu, Hunter Tura, Matthew Hoffman and Francesca Giuliani – selected the winners of the 2015 Fairy Tales competition.

First Place goes to “Empty” by Zigeng Wang, a Masters student at Princeton University. Rich, detailed images of a postindustrial world illustrate an hyperrealistic, scifiesque story about the great ethical and environmental dilemmas associated with globalization.

Second Place is awarded to “Beautifully Banal” by Alexander Culler and Danny Travis. A delightful style exercise, this story leverages CAD drawings to illustrate a mundane scenario in spectacular fashion: a fly is trapped inside an office building.

For the third Place there is a tie between “Screenland, By A Pixel” by Samantha Lee and Zhan Wang; and “CTRL C CTRL ME” by Pauline Marcombe, Helene Marcombe, and Jay Robinson. In “Screenland, By A Pixel”, whimsical elaborations of a pixel, the atom of contemporary architecture creation, accompany a riff of Edwin Abbott Abbott’s “Flatland”. “CTRL C CTRL ME” illustrates by way of metaphor what happens in the passage from inspiration to regulation. Colorful drawings narrate the story of a shrinking architect, becoming smaller and smaller under the pressure of technology and business rules.

Alexander Culler and Danny Travis, Beautifully Banal

The winning entries, along with the honorable mentions and other notable submissions, will be featured in Fairy Tales: When Architecture Tells a Story Volume 2. The anthology will give readers the opportunity to experience first hand what happens when creatives tell a story. The book is designed by Bruce Mau Design, with a special cover by Spanish artist Vicente GarciaMorillo.