The Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) forms part of the prestigious Mies van der Rohe Award. Since 2016, this prize has been awarded every two years by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe and Creative Europe. It recognises the work of recently qualified architects, urban planners and landscape architects across Europe. At the third edition, the YTAA 2020, Willem Hubrechts, an architectural engineer and graduate of KU Leuven, won one of the four main prizes with his project ‘Off the Grid. Re/defining the urban Andes through Ayacucho’s water urbanism’.

Together with a few other students, Willem Hubrechts travelled to the city of Ayacucho in Peru. Over the past few decades, an ever-growing population has fled poverty in the Andean villages to live in the city. In the last ten years, Ayacucho’s population has increased sixfold and now stands at nearly 200,000 inhabitants. This population growth alone is already a huge challenge for the city’s future development, but combined with increasing drought caused by climate change, the management of drinking water and local ecosystems are under threat. The population is growing and water is becoming scarce. The question, therefore, is how the city can optimise existing water resources, and how to reduce water consumption in some way?