A platform that welcomes architectural experiments
Essen, August 2020. The AIT Interior Scholarship is Europe's only scholarship for interior design and rewards students for their ideas and creative thinking. It is sponsored by the non-profit Sto Foundation and AIT, the trade journal for architects and interior designers. The scholarship, which totals €24,000, is the only one of its kind in Europe. It has been awarded for the tenth time this year. A monthly grant of €500 each allows the students to focus on their studies more effectively for one year.
The recipients for the 2020/2021 academic year are: Floriane Libilbehety (Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, Netherlands), Mari Jögi (Estonia Academy of Arts, Tallinn, Estonia), Lauritz Bohne (TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands) and Catalina Dumitru (University of Architecture and Urbanism Bucuresti, Romania). 66 students of 25 different nationalities and from 17 countries had applied.
"In spite of the generally uncertain times during this pandemic, we once again had a lot of applicants. The submitted portfolios demonstrated an extraordinary diversity of viewpoints, which were also shaped by the different ways in which interior design is taught", said Prof. Peter Cheret, Foundation Council Member for Architecture of the Sto Foundation. He praised the willingness of candidates to experiment: "An important part of the application was how the applicants solved the impromptu assignment they had been given – especially in those cases in which students seized the opportunity to question the conventional wisdom and surprised themselves and others by finding their own solutions".
This year, applicants were supposed to grapple with the topic "To have or to be? The new spaces of the sharing economy". They were asked to design a room while considering the following questions: What new public spaces are being created? What needs do these new spaces have to meet? How does this change the share of public and private spaces? What effect does this have on how we deal with the interior?
By awarding the Interior Scholarship, the foundation and the trade journal want to help interior architects who are willing to experiment while also ensuring diversity in the field. In addition to receiving financial support, the scholarship recipients will also get to showcase their work in the AIT-ArchitekturSalon. They will also regularly report on their work in a blog on the Foundation's social media channels.
