DIVISARE's Story
Change isn’t easy. We have been online since 1998. When our homepage first appeared, it was called "Europaconcorsi", and the Euro and Google didn’t exist yet. Many things have changed over the last 16 years. The time was come for us to change too. This is the story of how and why we planned to turn from "Europaconcorsi" to "DIVISARE". Divisare has been online since 12 August 2015, but it is part of a much longer story: the story of Europaconcorsi.
Europaconcorsi is a site for architects founded in October 1998. When its homepage appeared for the first time the euro still did not exist and Larry Page had founded Google just one month earlier. The Internet was just getting started. At first Europaconcorsi was a service to inform architects about design competitions in Europe (in Italian, "concorsi" means competitions), on recently issued tenders as well as the results of competitions, with rankings of the winners and the participating projects. From the outset Europaconcorsi was conceived as a structure of related but distinct databases: information on competitions, projects and designers was gathered in autonomous data structures. This turned out to be helpful for future developments.
Another important factor is that Europaconcorsi was created as an open web application, where designers could open their own account and independently post their projects. This too contributed to the site’s success. The projects section soon became the most important feature of the site, generating about 4/5 of overall traffic on its own. At this point the name “Europaconcorsi” no longer corresponded to what the site had become over the years: a vast archive of international architecture. Over the 16 years of the brief history of Europaconcorsi many things have changed. Competitions have changed, our way of thinking about Europe has changed, and above all the Internet and our way of communicating online have evolved. The time was come for us to change too. So in 2015 we decided to spin off the project database from Europaconcorsi, transforming it into something new: DIVISARE.
Europaconcorsi is a site for architects founded in October 1998. When its homepage appeared for the first time the euro still did not exist and Larry Page had founded Google just one month earlier. The Internet was just getting started. At first Europaconcorsi was a service to inform architects about design competitions in Europe (in Italian, "concorsi" means competitions), on recently issued tenders as well as the results of competitions, with rankings of the winners and the participating projects. From the outset Europaconcorsi was conceived as a structure of related but distinct databases: information on competitions, projects and designers was gathered in autonomous data structures. This turned out to be helpful for future developments.
Another important factor is that Europaconcorsi was created as an open web application, where designers could open their own account and independently post their projects. This too contributed to the site’s success. The projects section soon became the most important feature of the site, generating about 4/5 of overall traffic on its own. At this point the name “Europaconcorsi” no longer corresponded to what the site had become over the years: a vast archive of international architecture. Over the 16 years of the brief history of Europaconcorsi many things have changed. Competitions have changed, our way of thinking about Europe has changed, and above all the Internet and our way of communicating online have evolved. The time was come for us to change too. So in 2015 we decided to spin off the project database from Europaconcorsi, transforming it into something new: DIVISARE.