Press release
ET CONTEST – Beyond Underground:
the winners of the ideas competition announced
28 entries, nine teams awarded: all three prizes shared ex aequo, plus three special mentions. Awards ceremony and exhibition of the projects in late October.
The ET CONTEST – Beyond Underground ideas competition has concluded with the announcement of its winners. The competition was launched to gather proposals and reflections on the surface design of the Einstein Telescope, the major research infrastructure for which the site of Sos Enattos, in Sardinia, is a candidate.
The competition is promoted by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR) of the University of Cagliari, in collaboration with the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, the Fondazione di Sardegna, the INFN (National Institute for Nuclear Physics), IGEA S.p.A. and the Municipality of Lula, and forms part of the long-running ILS – Innovative Learning Spaces programme, an international platform for design research and experimentation.
Entrants were asked to develop a broad transformative scenario — masterplan— and, at the same time, to set out proposals for the form and siting of new architecture and for the possible reuse of existing buildings.
A total of 28 entries were received and assessed by the jury, chaired in a non-voting capacity by Massimo Faiferri and made up of the architects Giancarlo Mazzanti (Colombia), Sebastián Irarrázaval (Chile), João Nunes (Portugal) and Juan Elvira (Spain), together with Giovanni Bisoffi (INFN), coordinator of the TETI working group (Team per Einstein Telescope in Italia).
The competition brief provided for three prizes, with the option of awarding them ex aequo where more than one entry was judged to merit them, as well as for special mentions. In view of the overall quality of the material submitted, the jury decided to award all three prizes ex aequo, alongside three special mentions: nine teams in total. That same quality — and the resulting difficulty in drawing up the ranking — accounts for the delay in announcing the results.
The winners
First prize ex aequo
- Code HS8NC1 — Flavio Mancuso (team leader, Italy), Ana Lucía Mesías Santa Cruz, Philippa Dechent, Matteo Fiorentino
- Code 25ZI0M — Francesco Crocchini (team leader, Italy), Javier Roig Iglesias
Second prize ex aequo
- Code UVI65M — Camille Latatse (team leader, France), Giulia Renda, João Figueiredo, Emiel Desaever, Laura Fortuna
- Code AZKG6C — Roberta Cossu (team leader, Italy), Giacomo Locci, Filippo Fulghesu
Third prize ex aequo
- Code 78B95Z — Francesco Chiacchiera (team leader, Italy), Benedetta Di Leo, Luca Pau, Francesco Baldoni, Gaia Ciccioli, Rebecca Mondaini, Gianluigi Mondaini, Maddalena Ferretti
- Code S27NLY — David Escudero (team leader, Spain), Diego Sacristán Arroyo, David Soriano Cano, Paula Morán Barroso
Special mentions
- Code VF908B — Federico Rojch (team leader, Italy), Daniele Angelone, Noemi Ena, Massimo Devino
- Code 794DAS — Myungsun Kim (team leader, South Korea), Angelo Marzocchi
- Code IVQMPF — Carla Sechi (team leader, Italy), Benedetta Rubattu, Gavina Piras, Manuela Piras
The jury’s assessment
The 28 entries offered a wide range of interpretations: some teams worked at the overall scale of the intervention, others on more specific actions; carefully defined and measured proposals for architectural and landscape transformation sat alongside more open-ended strategies, capable of setting out scenarios that shift and unfold over time.
João Nunes saw in the entries a mature and considered response to a complex problem built on an interweaving of scales, noting that the risk of focusing too narrowly on the architectural object had been avoided in favour of thinking about context and relationships. Giancarlo Mazzanti underlined the value of competitions as a democratic means of selection and as one of the few genuine routes by which young designers gain access to public commissions. Sebastián Irarrázaval highlighted the variety of approaches — from “invisible” and topographical constructions to autonomous objects placed within the landscape — and the quality achieved by a number of entries at the level of detail. Juan Elvira recalled that the jury assessed both design proficiency and the conceptual ambition of the proposals, including those that prompted the liveliest debate among its members. Giovanni Bisoffi, for the INFN and the TETI group, observed that although the scientific part of the infrastructure lies underground, the way it presents itself at the surface is decisive for the bid, and that the projects were also read by imagining how a community of physicists would work within them.
Carlo Mannoni, director general of the Fondazione di Sardegna, which funded the prizes, described the ET project as a whole as the most significant transformative prospect currently available to Sardinian society, noting that the decision to award ex aequo is itself an indication of the high average quality of the entries.
The chair of the jury, Massimo Faiferri, closed by drawing attention to the strong presence of mixed and international teams, which enriches the competition in terms of the links it creates between Italian and international researchers and designers.
The material gathered will form a body of reflection of value both to the preparation of the documents supporting the bid and to future design work, should the Sos Enattos site be selected to host the infrastructure.
Awards ceremony and exhibition
The official awards ceremony will take place in late October, most likely in Lula, accompanied by an exhibition of all 28 projects submitted: it will provide the occasion for the discussion of individual projects between jury and entrants, which has been deferred to that event. The exact dates will be announced during August, by direct communication to all 28 participating teams and by publication on the competition website.
The administration of the competition was handled by the cul.tur.ale association; the prizes were funded by the Fondazione di Sardegna.
ET CONTEST forms part of a wider set of initiatives promoted under the ET WORKSHOP | BEYOND UNDERGROUND event, which arises from an institutional agreement between the Autonomous Region of Sardinia and the University of Cagliari,
