The sixth edition of the Félix Candela Award is a dream of the city. After several editions spent traversing the countryside in search of truth, this edition focuses on the quintessential social construct of architecture: the city. The city is the built form of human relationships and, as such, represents us as a society. The question is whether our current city is also our will. Between the Captive and the Warrior, we choose to be both, in that oscillation that Spanish architect Francisco Javier Sáenz de Oíza spoke of—from the city to the countryside, and now from the countryside back to the city. We return from the field with at least the tools of the woodsman, the hunter, the farmer, the gardener, or the shepherd, ready to insert what we have learned into the robust trunk of our cities.
This edition does not aim to offer a general solution to the reality of the contemporary city based on a simplistic or superficial understanding of the urban environment as an "unsolvable problem." If it is a problem, its origin ultimately lies in the relationship between people and a lack of will: the assertion that there is no city without citizens is as true as the fact that it is the will of the citizens that makes cities. If a tree’s bark harbors a fungus, or a branch is cracked, rotten, or dry, this does not affect the species itself, but rather the state of that specific specimen. However, it is difficult to see the forest for the trees. Thus, this edition seeks to speak about the city by opening a clearing within it, defining a blank space where we can insert, fearlessly and uncompromisingly, a different species of city. We appeal to the architect's will to dream of a different city—one that, while still a city, is the best possible version, and ultimately the representation of an ideal society made of citizens. In contrast to architects who "solve" problems—or create them through descriptions, analyses, and predictions, only to stage their solution—we once again champion Architecture as an art through the projective tool: Architecture is the science of art.
The starting point will be the free choice by participants of a specific city, upon which they will practice a reserve or cutout, allowing for the grafting of a different species of city onto the chosen city or fragment thereof.
