Commended: Sofia Anja Singler, Yale School of Architecture
Agricultural Co-Operative School, Clarinda, Iowa
‘There’s a slightly haunted, Hopper-esque quality to her proposal for an agricultural facility in Iowa,’ said judge Hugh Pearman. That quality is justified; agricultural traditions in the rural US mid-west, Singler explains, are no longer transferred between generations so skills and knowledge of that land must be transmitted, not by inheritance, but through relearning. Singler has produced an educational facility elevation, ‘a mixed overlay of watercolour, pencil, pen, CAD line work and newspaper cuttings’, with a consequential feel that impressed the judges. Eric Parry loved ‘the technique that produced its distant, objectified quality’, with Jes Fernie feeling that if her other images had been similarly loaded ‘we could have been looking at a potential winner'. Singler said her image ‘hints at the critique it offers of the present day; to be romantically nostalgic would be hopelessly unproductive, yet it seems an inevitable conclusion that something has been lost.’
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