In 1997, in order to celebrate and to announce the launching of the magazine, 2G International Architecture Review convoked a first international ideas competition aimed at students and architects under the age of forty. On that occasion the competition proposed as a design subject the developing of the future headquarters of the Mies van der Rohe Foundation, the body responsible for managing the German Pavilion in Barcelona, created by Mies van der Rohe to represent Germany in the Barcelona International Exhibition of 1929.
On the occasion of the celebration of the magazine’s tenth anniversary, 2G launches a second international ideas competition: 2G Competition. Venice Lagoon Park. This theoretical initiative grows out of taking this publication to be a forum of reflection and a vehicle for the dissemination of unpublished projects which helps to develop and to publicise the ideas of students, architects and related professionals under 40 on the international scene. This ideas competition, which does not involve subsequent phases of the project or its execution, is an inducement to free, non-restrictive reflection, the objective being to embark on a worthwhile debate within the profession.
While the first competition encouraged ideas about a paradigmatic building through an enlargement project, the 2nd 2G Competition elects to reconsider the contemporary city through a project which reclaims the landscape and confronts the tension existing between global interests and local needs, in which tourism-understood as the most important economic, social and territorial phenomenon of the second half of the 20th century-might live in harmony with the cohesive, social needs of the citizen.
This approach represents a widening of horizons in terms of the 1st 2G Competition, since it goes beyond the boundaries of the strictly architectural project in order to accede to the sphere of landscape design, urbanism, sustainability and other problems present in current professional debates. Similarly, the 2nd 2G Competition invites an interdisciplinary participation that might help enrich the debate thanks to the confluence of new perspectives that complement the vision of the architect.
