Jonathan Schmalöer receives Award for Architecture and Urban Design
RWTH alumnus and architect Jonathan Schmalöer, along with Philipp Valente, receives the City of Dortmund's Sponsorship Award in "Architecture and Urban Design". The prize has been awarded every two years since 1978 in alternating art categories and is endowed with a total of 15,000 euros in accordance with a council resolution from 2022. The two winners share the prize money. The jury, chaired by City Councilor Ludger Wilde, made the decision on August 26, 2022. The jury sees in both award winners different but equally strong architectural personalities who think architecture and urban development in diverse contexts and in sustainable perspectives. In the opinion of the jury, they each demonstrate an architectural and artistic approach that can contribute to making architecture and urban development more humane, social and ecologically meaningful. The sponsorship awards will be presented by Lord Mayor Thomas Westphal in a ceremony at the Baukunstarchiv NRW on December 11, 2022.
Jonathan Schmalöer was born in Dortmund in 1991 and studied architecture in Aachen and Graz. He is a staff member at LuFo Raumgestaltung at RWTH Aachen University. The jury describes Jonathan Schmalöer as a young architect with an eye for future issues. In the foreground of his work, he says, is an ecological and social awareness that opposes the throwaway mentality. Material cycles, building in the existing fabric, low-tech - these are just a few of the terms he deals with in his architectural and artistic work. His architectural designs show a sensitive approach to existing urban structures and the built environment. His artistic works foreground the narrative and make use of the means of language and photography. "With Jonathan Schmalöer, a personality is honored who critically and productively questions architectural conditions and processes, as well as his own role, political and social possibilities, time and again," said the jury.
With the prize, the city of Dortmund wants to promote artists who have not yet reached the age of 40, who are connected to Dortmund by birth, residence or their work and whose artistic expression contains a characteristic content-related or structural profile and represents the cultural forms of expression of the named division.
Jonathan Schmalöer applied, among other things, with his master's thesis "Reorganization of a 60 Ensemble, Dortmund" (examiner: Univ.-Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Uwe Schröder), written in 2019 at the Department of Interior Design. Brief description of the thesis:
The southern Nordmarktquartier in Dortmund is characterized by one thing in particular: Where there used to be a Wilhelminian-style perimeter block development, there are now the monofunctionalist residential solitaires of the 1960s. In the context of my final thesis I dedicated myself to one of these solitaires and its surroundings: the so-called horror high-rise. This resulted in an urban planning concept for the revitalization of the neighborhood and a design for the redensification of the parcels around the old high-rise.