LOTW: Europaconcorsi

Europa Concorsi is an Italian site dedicated to the profession of architecture.  Using a free translator on the internet Europaconcorsi roughly translates from Italian to English: Europe Competitons.  Although the entire site is in Italian, it is by far one of  the premiere resources on the internet for discovering new architects and projects from around the world.  Although the site is in Italian and it can be difficult to navigate, the quality of content outweighs the difficulty of breaking through the language barrier.  The positive of the site being in Italian is that I have found myself learning the Italian language little by little each day, and discovering projects that most sites or magazine simply do not cover.  The quality of content and coverage is the reason that we have a lot of link love for this site, all five hearts worth.
User Guide:

If you would like to get the most out of this resource it is necessary to read the full review, otherwise you will become frustrated with the difficulty involved in navigating a site in a different language. The two main features that I use on this website are the slide show on the main page, and the cerca or search feature.  The slide show on the main page is absolutely awesome, and presents what appears to be an endless supply of inspiring architectural design imagery.  The slide show interface is very easy to use and allows you to view many projects in a short amount of time.  Unfortunately like many sites most of the projects featured are unbuilt projects, but they do have a large supply of built architectural imagery. The ratio of unbuilt to built is roughly 60/40. If you find a project that you like in the slide show, click on the link to navigate to more images of the project along with information and a link to the complete listing of the architect’s portfolio as documented on the site.  Once you have discovered a project or architect that interests you I suggest going to that architect’s website for further research, unless you are fluent in Italian.

The cerca feature is the second great feature of the site because the website is essentially a huge database of architectural projects!  Unlike Great Buildings Online the information supplied by Europaconcorsi is of high quality and is actually useful.  If you know of a building or are trying to find information on an architect odds are that this site has something about the architect or building documented.  Tatiana Bilbao is one of my favorite unknown architects from Mexico.  Their work is simply amazing, but their site does not contain a portfolio of  their projects.  If you go to the Europaconcorsi site and type in Tatiana Bilbao in the cerca box, seven projects with images and descriptions are listed!

If I were fluent in Italian perhaps I would be able to appreciate the full value of the Europaconcorsi site, but until then I can only imagine that this site would destroy mainstream magazine sites like Architectural Record or Metropolis Magazine.  Europaconcorsi is a site that you should definitely check out when you are searching for inspiration whenever you are about to start a design project.  While writing this article I have come to the conclusion that the beautiful thing about architecture and design, is that quality design has no boundaries.  Dispite language, cultural or physical barriers, architecture and design can move the hearts of men and women, regardless of their differences.

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