Albanian architect Endri Marku, who is also a lecturer at Polis University in Tirana has won a top prize for one of his drawings.
Entitled “Vortex”, the piece won the non-student prize awarded by Architizer, one of the world’s leading architecture portals.
The One Drawing Challenge 2021 asked architects at any stage of their career to create a drawing that powerfully communicates architectural space. This can be existing or conceptual and should capture the experience of those that inhabit it.
Marku’s piece was described as a “frenetic, surreal drawing” consisting of a “seemingly never-ending sketch that depicts an architectural battle between stability and chaos.” Architizer noted that it was “an appropriate symbol for the global turbulence of the past 12 months.”
One could also consider that perhaps recent demolitions of villas, theaters, and public spaces to make way for unbridled construction, may have influenced his work. In fact, one juror noted that many drawings in this year’s competition “illustrate the increasing amount of objects and buildings in our environment.”
James Wines who sat on the jury noted he was delighted with the quality of the submissions as well as the use of superior graphic talents to tell provocative and trenchant stories in an endangered world.
Another juror, Amader Berber, said that this year’s entries were “the most profound to date. She added, “I believe that, due to the world’s situation over the past year, people were stimulated to critical thinking and the resulting drawings were incredible.”
Marku told Architeizer that:
“The drawing intends to represent the fragility of our reality which, most of the time, is too locked in the present. The inherited cities, signs and the superficial order of our civilization give us the illusion of stability and perennial continuity while our existence is actually only a bubble in between infinite and nomadic spirals of space and time, an urban continuum slowly dissolving, whose orderly structure is incapable to sustain humanity’s descending spiral.”
