In the International architectural internet competition of the 41st Zagreb Salon on the subject “The Quest for Ethic” everybody was invited participate with a maximum of two proposals that have been envisaged as a conceptual redefinition of the notions of good and evil through architecture.
The competition aims to be an orientation point for revalorization of architecture. According to the selector, humanistic and elementary qualities of architecture are quite neglected in the contemporary discourses. For those who find this concept too radical and pretentious the competition offers other entries such as Ethic is beauty and Architecture is a good thing, thus offering the possibility to explore the aesthetization or motivation as such.

The proposals were submitted in the form of designs, concepts, presentations of built environments, videos, interactive computer work, web projects or texts. The competition is open to all professionals or students from the domain of architecture and urban planning, landscape architecture, graphic design, industrial design and all the other disciplines based on the visual interpretation of reality.

Following the suggestion of the selector, the Organizational Board awarded the prizes of the International Internet competition of the 41st Zagreb Salon. The prize fund was HRK 24,000 (equivalent to EUR 3,300 )

Architecture is a good thing

When the Salon’s organizational committee proposed that I should formulate the topic for the Internet competition and to select the works for it, I was aware of the fact that the Zagreb Salon of Architecture is an extremely important manifestation as it is one of those rare energetic points through which Croatian architecture is embodied, structured, and through which it imposes themes and values, regardless of the intellectual or spatial achievements of architecture, or the even more questionable Croatian architectural scene.
Today Croatian architecture has been divested of any serious contextualities, even those banal ones offered by money or more serious ideology, so that even good architecture superficially flaunts itself with its perfectionist design and sophistication. The lack of any kind of intellectual effort which would correspond to something other than liberal entrepreneurship, or vanity, is disastrous as it pushes architecture into a limbo of servile conformity.
In that kind of situation it seemed only right to implement the theme of ethics into the non-existent professional or public discourse without any fear that we would be accused of plagiarism or the repetition of used-up ideological spaces. By the very fact that the theme of ethics appeared in one of the sections of the Salon, enough was done even under the more modest measures. The context that was so lacking was thus introduced. The somewhat Proustian title “In Search of Ethics” was intended to create a sense of dynamism that would be inspiring to the competitors, but in its final phases the title was revised to read “Architecture is a Good Thing”. The competition was intended to affirm architecture as an activity for which goodness and the care of fellow beings is immanent, whereas all additional aspects such as politics, aesthetics has further complicated things so that the original idea of architecture is mainly degraded into something unrecognisable.

The theme was extremely ambitious and fluid and the entries that arrived as responses to the posed questions can best be structured according to linguistic elements, those urban and architectural, and to metalinguistic videos and texts. The methodological entries are divided into visionary, programmatic, critical and contemplative categories. It was not an easy task to structure such a heterogeneous corpus into winning entries, so that the awards were granted to those entries that affirmed the intellectual context as the only possible origin of architecture, as that corrective dimension without which the misuses of architecture are obscenely easy and brutally painful.

Mice Gamulin, MA