Toespraak van staatssecretaris Uslu bij uitreiking Prix de Rome

Toespraak | 01-12-2022

• Good evening, everyone!
• I am, of course, looking at six people in particular.
• These young creatives are the reason we are all here.
• I have just had an opportunity to admire your work.
• I have wandered through the worlds you have created, all of which do justice to this year’s theme: Healing Sites.
• Healing is very important.
• Especially in this time of uncertainty, in which we are all concerned about the climate, about how many new homes we can build, and how this will affect nature.
• Together, we must find the best way in which to restructure our small country.
• It is a huge challenge, but I see an important role for the urban planners, architects and landscape architects.
• And again, I am looking at this evening’s six nominees.
• You were able to transform locations, in which some unpleasant past is still tangible, into spaces that invite contemplation and reflection.
• Spaces that speak to us and make us think.
• That reveal not only the strength of healing, but also the strength of the young creatives responsible.
• You are able to tap the healing potential of these spaces.
• That is why society must invest in your talent and ideas; as we do with the Prix de Rome.
• It is an award with a very long and eventful history.
• In the nineteenth century, candidates were expected to take part in a sort of ‘boot camp’.
• They would be confined to a room in the attic of the Rijksakademie, where they would work from dawn till dusk.
• Their meals were passed to them through a hatch in the door.
• I hope that the circumstances for this year’s competition were less spartan!
• I have just seen how much work was involved.
• You had just four months in which to take your concepts from rough outline to reality, to refine your ideas.

• I invite you to visit those worlds again with me now.
• Let us enter each of them one more time before I announce the name of the winner.
• I shall begin with the Tax Office Complex, where you can almost feel the pain experienced by the victims of the child support scandal.
• This unfortunate situation dramatically eroded public confidence in the government.
• It will take much time and effort to regain that confidence, we are working hard to do so.
• In its Grounds of [in]Justice project, Studio KIWI proposes the transformation of both the site as a whole and the buildings themselves.
• Through clear and evident changes, they hope to bring government and the citizen closer together.
• Respect for the human dimension will mean that we can once again see ‘eye to eye’.
• No longer will we be living in a paper reality.
• The jury acknowledges this, and praises the humorous way in which you have approached such a weighty topic.

• Let’s move on to another ‘world’. Not in the Netherlands this time, but in Ukraine. It is the village of Hrabove, the site of the MH17 disaster.
• Lesia, I would like to address you personally for a moment.
• Even in a time in which your own world has been torn apart by a war, you continue to create.
• You have embraced the chaos. It enables you to take a fresh look at the world around you.
• You have opted to rely not only on the traditional instruments of architecture, but to take a broader approach.
• In No Innocent Landscape, you reveal how illegal mining, geopolitical conflicts and environmental pollution are all intertwined.
• This is a location where words – both in the past and today – fall short. And as the jury acknowledges, so does the language of architecture.
• You managed to transform this space into an oasis of calm.
• One that invites awareness and reflection.
• That is a remarkable achievement.

• This brings us to the third ‘new world’, the so-called ‘Colony of Benevolence’ in Veenhuizen.
• This was once the site of a government anti-poverty programme. Orphans, beggars and poor families were brought here and set to work on the land, with the belief that hard work would ‘heal’ them.
• The (Dividual) team has taken precisely the opposite approach in Celebrating the Unproductive.
• This concept is based on the belief that doing absolutely nothing will promote healing.
• A large area of the landscape should therefore be ‘returned to nature’ and allowed to grow wild.
• The team has also examined what the community actually needs and has designed an extremely efficient system for water, energy, food and resources production to border the wild area.
• This radically different interpretation of productivity has also been praised by the jury.

• Then the final world: the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. 
• Arna Mačkić wishes to call architecture to account by transforming the site into the Public Centre for Architectural Disaster and Collective Healing.
• It will be a focus for the examination of the misery and suffering that architectural disasters have caused, and how we can work together to promote healing.
• The jury describes the concept as ‘extremely professional’ and speaks highly of the way in which Arna has developed her ideas.

• So we have visited four locations.
• All have made a deep impression on me.
• They have touched me, moved me and inspired me.
• Each, in its own special way, has demonstrated the strength of healing.
• I am so glad that I am not a member of the jury, because I would find it extremely difficult to pick just one winner.

• The winner of the Prix de Rome for Architecture 2022, is… Lesia Topolnyk!