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Ideas and innovation, competition and research - roland bosbach
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Ideas are the most valuable asset of young architects having to compensate for a lack of experience in professional practice. Ideas, and a somehow naive creativity that allows them to explore scenarios beyond the restrictions of the market and the confinements of professional realism. Scenarios that can provoke, gloss over the unsolvable, or simply rewrite reality to open up new ways of thinking. And in the environment of the architectural profession where the emphasis is still on the built object it is left to competitions to express these ideas. It is here, where alternative approaches and working methods can be tested and applied.

Studying architecture in the former east Germany after reunification, during a period of breathtaking restructuring, both of society and the built environment, created in retrospect a unique experience and opportunity. It was a period that provoked a confrontation with the underlying dynamics of urban transformation and most importantly helped to form an investigation into the interface where urban and architectural design meets with public perception. Dresden, like many other East German and Eastern European cities, had been exposed to the changing urban ideologies and to every politically motivated architectural style that Socialism could produce - from the early Stalinistic regionalism to rational realism to the belated decorative prefabrication. The fall of the wall marked an end to the stylistic dogmas and experiments with the influx of consumerism and the implementation of the social market economy. But it also created a public that was somehow more liberated and critical than the incoming tide of western architects with their own baggage of styles. The public in their newly found freedom decided to opt for the baroque nostalgia as the way forward and left the architectural profession puzzled. Yet the brutal urbanistic experiments had created qualities of living (living in the city centre) that were strongly cherished by the public and left a sweet aftertaste of a period when political will superseded market forces.