Bee Breeders Architecture Competitions has announced the winners of competition for Melbourne Tattoo Academy, which has selected 3 winners from Switzerland, France and Spain. The competition has also selected 6 Honorable Mentions as wells BB Student Awards and BB Green Award-can be seen on the competition website.

The Melbourne Tattoo Academy architecture competition tasked participants with creating an institution that would teach this ancient and popular artform, whilst working to dispel at least some of the stigma surrounding it. The selected winning entries challenged personal and social concepts of the tattoo as an art form and its cultural, philosophical implication in architecture.

For the first time in Bee Breeders history, all three winning projects were entries submitted by university students. Therefore, the competition's 1st place winners from Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne also received BB Student Award. This entry stood apart because of its strong response to a difficult urban condition and its conceptual relationship to the ethos and culture of tattoos. The project separated the two triangular sites with a perforated black metal screen along a diagonal street. This created a partially concealed interior environment that created a gradient of interior privacy while interfacing with the public and allowing a flexible floor plate for future use.

The second and third place winners were projects submitted from France’s École Nationale Superieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux, and Spain’s Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. These projects created an urban artists colony and a 'Tattoo city' respectively, tackling cultural assumptions and creating a public and almost voyeuristic enclave for an art that is often considered taboo.

Finally, Bee Breeders' BB Green Award was presented to an entry from Hong Kong, whose 'Stories of Narrators' addresses complexity of sustainability and sustainable architecture.

See the winning projects with jury comments below:

1st prize: Melbourne Tattoo Academy by Matthieu Friedli, Agathe Sautet, Clara Berthaud -École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Jury comments: The first place entry stands apart because of its strong response to a difficult urban condition and its conceptual relationship to the ethos and culture of the tattoo. The project combines the two triangular sites, separated by a diagonal street, with a perforated black metal screen to create a rectangular urban frame. This frame partially conceals and contains an interior environment separate from the surrounding urban fabric, comprised of an open-air park on one lot and a concrete, steel, and glass structure on the larger lot. 

While the exterior frame disrupts the urban grid and allows it to stand apart from its urban fabric, the interior deploys a steel post-and-beam grid structural solution, oriented to the fabric of the city. This frame and structural system create a gradient of interior privacy while interfacing with the public and allowing a flexible floor plate for future use. The material selection evokes a raw refinement, elevating the practice and culture of the tattoo as a sophisticated institution. Ultimately, the strength of the project is found in its careful balance between the powerful demarcation of its territory through a simple frame, reflecting the ethos of the act of the tattoo as an irreversible transgression, opening its interior to the public through its simple tectonic kit of parts, and allowing the building to evolve over time.

1st prize winners interview

2nd prize: The Tower and the Lair of Tattoo by Morgan Baufils-Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et de Paysage de Bordeaux, France 

Jury comments: The second place entry for the Melbourne Tattoo Academy is awarded to a project that stands out through its clear distinction as other. In forming an urban artist colony of sorts, the project acts as a haven for like minded individuals to gather, collaborate, and experiment. The narrative of the project takes on the cultural assumption of tattoo as a form of underground art that is both intimate and exclusive, while also being exhibitionist and voyeuristic. 

This is expressed through an architecture that is simultaneously fortified, moody, and inward looking, yet outward in its iconic scale and artistic expression. The proposal keenly develops cross connections between two related art forms, tattoo, or body art, and graffiti, or street art. Both tattoo and graffiti are forms of inscription, the tattoo traditionally more personal and graffiti, social. Through connecting the two forms of expression, the project enhances the social nature of both. Developing a cultural correlation between subject and venue, body and building. For both the tattoo artist and graffiti artist, the building acts as a form of blank canvas for rotating collaborations. Through narrative and architectural form, the second place entry creates a countercultural utopia, setting the academy apart as other from its context.

2nd prize winner interview

3rd prize: Tattoo City by Alexandru Tintea and Arturo Garrido-Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, Spain

Jury comments: The third place entry for the Melbourne Tattoo Academy is unique in its treatment of the urban. “Tattoo City” creates a campus in the city, establishing a series of rooms — including a gallery, exhibition space, presentation venue, coffee shop, and guesthouse — to create a public and almost voyeuristic enclave for an art that is often considered taboo. This series of rooms is connected by a “medieval street,” a public outdoor space that unites each programmatic piece to display and elevate the art of tattooing. 

By half-burying the program in a series of off axis rooms, the proposal establishes an exterior promenade, challenging the typological demands of a cultural ritual that is often pushed to the fringe of accepted societal norms. Through this critique of an art that is both an intimate act and an outward expression, “Tattoo City” questions the stigma of the tattoo, elevating it to an artistic discipline that demands public display and acknowledgement.

3rd prize winners interview

World Architecture Community is Media Partner for Bee Breeders Architecture Competitions. Bee Breeders Architecture Competitions are still receiving registrations for Architecture in Virtual Reality, Blue Clay Country Spa and Kip Island Auditorium competitions. 

World Architecture Community members will have 10$ discount by entering promo codes announced in the competition pages above. 

All images courtesy of Bee Breeders Architecture Competitions

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