Inside the thinking of NAGOYA Archi Fes 2024’s grand prize winner
A graduation design exhibition marks a demanding point in an architecture student’s education. Years of studio work, research, criticism, drawing, model-making, and revision are condensed into one public presentation. At NAGOYA Archi Fes, that presentation becomes part of a larger conversation involving students, educators, practicing architects, alumni, jurors, and visitors from outside the profession.
The 2024 Grand Prize winner stood out because the project did more than present a polished architectural proposal. It connected a clear social question with a carefully developed spatial response. The work showed how a graduation project can be ambitious without losing contact with daily life, local conditions, or the people who may eventually use the spaces being imagined.
In this interview-style feature, the winner reflects on the project’s starting point, the role of criticism, the challenge of communicating a complex idea, and the lessons that emerged from exhibiting alongside other students. The discussion also offers useful insight for future exhibitors preparing their own architectural thesis projects for a public jury.
Finding the question behind the project
The winner describes the project as beginning with uncertainty rather than a fixed building type. Instead of deciding immediately on a form, program, or visual language, the design process started by examining a condition that felt unresolved. The central question developed through observation, conversations, reading, and repeated attempts to define what architecture could realistically change.
That approach gave the project a strong internal direction. Each major decision could be tested against the original question: did the proposal create a more generous relationship between people and place, or was it simply adding another object to the landscape? This kind of test helped the student avoid decorative gestures and focus on the consequences of the design.
The project’s strength came from treating research as an active design tool. Site information was not used only to justify the final proposal. It influenced circulation, scale, material choices, thresholds, and the way different users might encounter the building. The result felt less like an isolated architectural statement and more like a framework for everyday activity.
The winner also emphasizes that the first idea was not the final idea. Early sketches were simplified, challenged, and sometimes abandoned. That willingness to change direction became an important part of the work. Rather than protecting an initial concept, the student allowed evidence from the site and feedback from reviewers to reshape the proposal.
Turning research into spatial decisions
Many graduation projects collect impressive information but struggle to transform it into architecture. In this case, research became visible through a series of spatial relationships. The project considered how people arrive, where they pause, what they can see, and how movement changes their understanding of the surrounding environment.
The winner explains that drawings were particularly useful when they showed more than appearance. Plans helped reveal patterns of use, while sections clarified differences in height, light, sound, and intimacy. Models made it possible to study the relationship between solid and empty space. Together, these tools helped convert an abstract argument into an inhabitable sequence.
Material thinking followed a similar path. Materials were not selected only for atmosphere or presentation quality. Their weight, texture, maintenance, and aging were considered as part of the project’s wider meaning. A surface could guide movement, establish a boundary, invite touch, or register the passage of time. These small decisions supported the larger architectural idea without needing excessive explanation.
The student’s process also demonstrates why iteration matters. A proposal may sound convincing in a written statement yet feel weak when translated into a plan or model. By moving repeatedly between words, drawings, physical studies, and critiques, the winner discovered where the argument was genuinely supported by space and where it remained rhetorical.
Learning to communicate under jury pressure
A public review tests more than the quality of a design. It tests whether the designer can make an unfamiliar audience understand the project within a limited period. At NAGOYA Archi Fes, the 2024 winner had to communicate with professional jurors while also presenting work that could be read by visitors who might not share the vocabulary of architecture school.
The winner prepared by reducing the project to a few essential ideas. This did not mean removing complexity. It meant establishing a clear order: first the condition that motivated the project, then the architectural response, followed by the evidence showing how the proposal worked. The drawings, model, diagrams, and text were arranged to support that sequence.
The event’s background helps explain why this kind of communication matters. The festival is designed as a public platform for graduation works, so exhibition design and verbal explanation are part of the architectural challenge. A project must be understandable at a glance, yet still reward close attention from experienced viewers.
Criticism during the selection process was treated as a form of testing rather than a judgment on personal ability. Some comments exposed unclear assumptions; others revealed aspects of the proposal that had not been explained effectively. The winner learned to distinguish between feedback that required a design change and feedback that called for a clearer presentation.
That distinction proved valuable. A strong idea can be weakened by poor diagrams, while a visually striking project can conceal unresolved problems. The jury process brought both dimensions into focus. It asked the student to make the project persuasive through its architecture and precise through its communication.
The elements that made the proposal memorable
The winning project balanced conceptual clarity with a sense of use. Its central theme was easy to identify, but the proposal did not depend on a single slogan. Visitors could understand the broader intention through the arrangement of spaces, the scale of the model, and the relationship between the project and its context.
A memorable feature was the way the design treated boundaries. Instead of presenting a sharp division between inside and outside, public and private, or movement and stillness, the project explored intermediate conditions. Transitional spaces became places where users could adjust their pace, meet others, observe activity, or choose how much they wanted to participate.
This spatial generosity gave the proposal relevance beyond its specific site. Architecture students often work with highly particular locations, yet the most successful graduation projects identify a wider human experience within that setting. The winner’s work suggested that questions of belonging, access, care, and shared space can be examined through precise architectural details.
The presentation also contributed to the project’s impact. Rather than filling the exhibition panel with every stage of development, the student edited the material carefully. A limited number of drawings carried the main argument, while supplementary studies showed depth for viewers who wanted to investigate further. The model was treated as an analytical instrument as well as a representation of the final design.
| Aspect of the project | How it supported the winning presentation | Lesson for future exhibitors |
|---|---|---|
| Research | Connected the architectural proposal to a recognizable local or social condition | Show how findings change the design, not just why the topic is important |
| Site response | Made movement, thresholds, and surrounding relationships central to the plan | Use plans and sections to explain experience as well as form |
| Material strategy | Linked atmosphere with durability, use, and the passage of time | Explain material choices through performance and meaning |
| Exhibition layout | Created a clear route from question to proposal to evidence | Edit drawings so visitors can understand the project quickly |
| Verbal presentation | Combined a concise narrative with answers to detailed criticism | Prepare a short explanation and a deeper level of supporting information |
What the jury recognized in the work
The professional jury assessed the project within a broad field of student proposals, each with its own theme, method, and visual language. The winning work did not need to imitate professional architecture to appear mature. Its maturity came from understanding the limits of its claim and developing the proposal carefully within those limits.
The jury’s response can be read as recognition of several qualities working together: a meaningful starting point, a direct relationship between research and form, an ability to imagine real use, and a presentation that made the project accessible. The award was therefore more than a reward for visual refinement. It acknowledged a complete design argument.
The professional jury is an important part of the festival’s educational value. Practicing architects and related professionals bring different standards and experiences to the review. Their questions can move between concept, construction, social responsibility, urban context, and the practical life of a building. For students, that range offers a concentrated encounter with the expectations surrounding architectural work.
The winner recalls that the most useful questions were often those that required a response beyond the prepared script. They revealed what the jurors saw as the project’s real stakes. Answering them required the student to speak plainly about priorities, compromises, and unresolved areas. That experience strengthened the project by making its position more explicit.
At the same time, the award did not remove the need for future development. The winner views the Grand Prize as encouragement to continue researching and designing, rather than as a final assessment. A graduation exhibition closes one academic chapter, but the questions raised by a strong project can continue into professional practice, postgraduate study, or independent work.
Advice for students preparing a graduation exhibit
The winner’s experience offers practical guidance for students who will present architectural thesis work in a competitive exhibition. Preparation should begin well before the final printing stage. A project needs time to be tested by people who have not followed its development and can identify where the explanation becomes difficult to follow.
The most important task is to decide what the audience must understand first. A complex project may contain years of investigation, but the exhibition cannot display every thought with equal emphasis. Establish a hierarchy between the main proposition, the spatial evidence, and the supporting material. This makes the work more inviting without making it simplistic.
Students should also rehearse the relationship between presentation and discussion. A jury may ask about structure, cost, management, environmental impact, users, or the reason a particular site was chosen. These questions are not distractions from the concept. They test whether the concept can operate as architecture.
Practical recommendations from the winner’s process include:
- Define the project’s central question in one precise sentence before editing the exhibition panels.
- Select drawings that demonstrate experience, use, and spatial relationships rather than relying on attractive images alone.
- Use models and diagrams to reveal decisions that cannot be understood from plans or perspectives.
- Practice explaining the project to someone outside architecture and note which points require clearer language.
- Treat criticism as design information, while preserving the project’s essential position and authorship.
Carrying the experience beyond the exhibition
Winning a graduation design competition can change how a student understands the relationship between architecture and its audience. Work that may have developed inside a studio is suddenly encountered by professionals, peers, families, local visitors, and people who have no obligation to understand it. That wider audience reveals whether the project has an idea that can travel beyond its original academic setting.
For the 2024 Grand Prize winner, the exhibition also created a chance to compare methods with other students. Some projects began with intense fieldwork, others with material experiments, social programs, speculative futures, or formal studies. Seeing those different approaches made clear that there is no single route to an effective architectural proposal. What matters is the strength of the connection between the question, the design process, and the final spatial claim.
The experience encourages a broader definition of success. An award is significant, but so is learning how to listen, edit, defend an idea, and recognize where a project can become more precise. These skills remain useful whether the next step is an architecture office, further education, research, community design, or another creative discipline.
NAGOYA Archi Fes gives emerging designers a setting in which their work can be seen as part of an ongoing regional and professional culture. The 2024 winner’s project demonstrates the value of that setting: a graduation design can be personal and specific while still opening a conversation about shared architectural concerns.
Explore the archive, study how past exhibitors present their ideas, and follow the next NAGOYA Archi Fes program for opportunities to encounter new work from architecture students across the Chubu region. Attend the exhibition, share the projects with others, and help give emerging designers the thoughtful audience their ideas deserve.