The following statement was released by the Firdusi Initiative.

During the online review session held on September 20th, the Jury of Alternative 33: an ideas competition for the urban revitalization of district 33 (Firdusi) awarded the first place to Nguyen Guy Phu’s project (Vietnam).

“The project may be considered a success as it best incorporates the existing urban structure and the heritage remaining in the site within the new development scheme; underlines the Jury, highlighting that “the plan does not require a predominant architectural/design style from the many stakeholders involved in the project, such as the investors or the designers. Instead, it clearly offers a base for a cultural self-expression, through which many directions of design can be realized”.

28 applications from 15 countries have been received for the competition. The maximum number of projects, 11 in total, were submitted from Armenia. Several applicants applied in collaboration with participants from different countries.

The jury decided to award the 2nd place to the project presented by “Storaket + Somewhere Something” architectural studio (Armenia), and the third place was given to the joint project of Iuliia Larikova, Ivan Selednikov and Ani Pogosyan (Germany).

The contest winners will receive monetary awards, which will be transferred to their indicated bank accounts that have been provided earlier.

In a few days, for a period of at least six months, the virtual exhibits of all the projects will be available at alt33.info. The best projects will be submitted for the review of the Government of the Republic of Armenia and  to Yerevan Municipality to discuss the expediency of their implementation.

The following four projects have been highly praised by the jury: the joint project of “Arwest Architects” (Armenia / Russia) and “Laap architects” (ITALY), the joint project of  Raquibul Hassan Bhuiyan and Mohammed Enfarad Chowdhury (Bangladesh), the joint project of Petro Vladimirov (Denmark) and Artur Gilfanov (Tatarstan, Russian Federation), Armen Arakelyan’s project (Armenia).

The jury members of the Alternative 33 international competition are well-known and distinguished specialists  in their fields from six different countries: Dr. George Arbid (Lebanon), Areg Asatryan (USA), Irina Subotić (Serbia), Movses Hrayr Der Kevorkian (Belgium), Narineh Mirzaeian (USA), Sevada Petrossian (Armenia), Taline Ter Minassian (France).

The Competition was organized by the Committee for the Protection of Yerevan's Heritage, and coordinated by urbanlab.

urbanlab is a Yerevan-based non-profit independent urban think-do-share lab, which initiated and organized numerous architectural competitions in Armenia with the aim to promote sustainable development in urban environment.