Architectural Award Research Articles

Lebbeus – A Postmodernist? Early Scenes of Shopping and Dwelling

AbstractVivid colours, commedia dell’arte, collage and hypergraphics, and villae jutting out of the cliffsides designed for the unknown dwellers – are these projects postmodern? American art, architecture and design critic Aaron Betsky investigates this question and its context, focusing on the V.I.P. Center Shopping Mall, an unbuilt scheme that was to win Lebbeus Woods his first professional acknowledgement under the auspices of the Progressive Architecture Award.

Encuentro con Enrique Ortiz Flores

On February 5, 2017, the Political Constitution of Mexico City was published in the Official Gazette, a symbolically relevant event loaded with a long political and cultural history to which this issue of the Anuario de Espacios Urbanos (AEU) dedicates a dossier. special. In this framework, the coordination of the AEU presents the meeting held with Enrique Ortiz Flores, a participant in the drafting group of the Constitution and, mainly, a reference in habitat issues in Mexico, Latin America and the world. [Brief profile of the CPCM] Enrique is an architect from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, his career stands out for a permanent fight for socio-spatial justice from various spaces such as civil organization, academia and public service. He was the founder and director of the Housing and Population Operational Center (Copevi), a reference in non-governmental organizations on habitat and housing in Mexico for more than 40 years; collaborated in the Secretariat of Human Settlements and Public Works (SAHOP) and in the National Fund for Popular Housing (Fonhapo). He has also been part of the Habitat International Coalition since its inception and is responsible for the founding of the regional office for Latin America. Among the recognitions he has received are the 2014 National Architecture Award, granted by the National Association of Engineers and Architects of Mexico; in 2017 he was honored by the Human Rights Commission of the Federal District; and in 2020 he received the "Popular Habitat" award from the Pan-American Federation of Architects Associations. For the support we received to achieve this meeting, we extend our thanks to Jerónimo Díaz and Patricia Santiago. We also send greetings and recognition to all who are and have been part of the International Coalition for Habitat, Latin America, for their work and fight for habitat rights and social justice.

The Art and Architecture of Victor Bohm (1900–1981)

The art and architecture of modernist architect and architectural theorist Victor Bohm (Bőhm Viktor, Böhm Viktor) are rare examples of modernism. At the same time, they were unusual for a provincial city—Miskolc (Hungary)—far from the modernist hub Budapest. Bohm worked in Miskolc during the 1930s, created numerous extraordinary buildings and shaped the skyline of this industrial town. He emigrated to the United States in 1939. The architectural language of his Hungarian designs followed modernist trends, a tendency less evident in his American projects. His buildings received architectural awards, and he has become known as a designer of medical and commercial buildings. He was a pioneer in the study of the relationship between architecture and psychology and sought to understand how an architectural design affects people and how the architect’s identity is manifested in their works. None of Bohm’s Hungarian buildings are protected; most of his buildings in Miskolc were demolished. The present study attempts to preserve his modernist, Hungarian legacy.

The online activism of mock translanguaging: Language style, celebrity persona, and social class in China

This paper examines a viral language style that emerged during online activism against a Chinese celebrity after she was announced the winner of an architecture award. Drawing upon insights from celebrity studies, online activism, and social semiotics, I examine how netizens creatively appropriate and mock celebrity language, focusing on the semiotic work netizens engage in to mobilize emotions, form solidarity networks, and perform collective action as they reveal the moral failures, injustice, and falsehood of celebrity culture. Three semiotic strategies are found to be key in enabling netizens to formulate their critique: entextualization, stylization, and typification. In this process, language serves multiple functions: it is the target of critique, a proxy for discussing social issues, a tool for building solidarity through mutual learning, and a creative way of pursuing fun. I argue that these semiotic moves turn language into power, allowing netizens to articulate discontent against the rich amid increasing disparity and lack of trust in a neoliberal society.

International Architecture News

The news highlights the UIA’s events concerning climate change and clean environment, the UIA 2030 Award launched in partnership with UN-Habitat, and the results of the 5th edition of the Baku International Architecture Award.

Economic return of architecture awards: Testing homebuyers’ motives for paying more

Architecture awards can increase the value of the winning properties, especially international accolades. This architecture award premium emerges only after the win and is orthogonal to the building's intrinsic aesthetic. The identification exploits a fact: Not all of the comparable, deserving projects succeed eventually. Propensity score matching isolates unwanted selection for treatment and preserves desired randomness, allowing difference-in-differences to compare projects having a similar chance of winning. We find a 5.4% architecture award premium in Singapore's housing market. Three different tests validate the common trend assumption. By triple-differences analyses, the award premium mainly belongs to large homes. It is unresponsive to construction quality and project visibility and decreases with winning projects' supply. A positive halo effect exists. These results lend much support to conspicuous consumption, among possible homebuyers' motives.

International Architecture News

The news section announces the topics of the UIA 2021RIO World Congress of Architects, its prizes and the jury. The news also presents the winners of the 2020/2021 UIA Friendly and Inclusive Spaces Awards and announces the 5th International Baku Architecture Award.

Architetture per la cultura. Ridefinire la montagna contemporanea

Alpine architecture for culture seems to best represent the evolution over time of the very concept of alpine architecture. By their actual nature, these buildings are configured not only as meeting spaces for the inhabitants but also – and above all – as means of attraction for visitors from the cities, towards which these objects seem to assume the role of real business cards. Thanks to the diffusion of virtuous reference models of contemporary architecture from all over the Alps, operated starting from 1992 by the Neues Bauen in den Alpen / Alpine Contemporary Architecture award, in recent decades Alpine architecture has begun to become an increasingly debated topic. Alpine architecture for culture, therefore, seems to play a particularly significant role in the construction of a new image on the contemporary Alps, and the buildings dedicated to its diffusion seem to succeed especially when they abandon the tourist imaginaries on the traditional and the typical Alpine, often distorted and stereotyped, to embrace a vision that undertakes a reinterpretation of local historical elements in the current context. Proposing cultural alpine buildings which look towards contemporaneity can therefore represent a great contribution in the diffusion of the mountain as a container of current events, as well as heritage and tradition. For these reasons, cultural architectures located in the mountains should also look to the present in their forms. Within this issue, are presented three architectures located in France, and three Italian projects, which are located in Priero, in Piedmont, and Estoul and Bard in the Aosta Valley.

A Study on Developing Future Scenarios in Architectural Design

The 21st century is known for globalisation and rapid transformations in technology. These transformations also affect architecture and the urban environment. Developing projections for the future of architecture is becoming more critical in this era, where the opportunities to adapt to rapid transformations are scarce. This study investigates how to develop future perspectives for the 21st century. Utopian speculations in the historical process and the 20th century's Futurism movement were examined in this regard. A collective and multi-future methodology has been developed as a unique approach. In this paper, a multifuture experimental study was conducted as a daily workshop. In the workshop, seven architecture students from various universities and different architectural education years studied possible future scenarios for Beşiktaş Fish Market. Students were tasked to produce designs in compliance with the chronological timeline of the future for the possible transformation of the Beşiktaş Fish Market. The market, designed by Gökhan Avcıoğlu and GAD in 2009, was accorded the 2012 International Architecture Award and 2014 Archmarathon Crowd. In light of the outcome products obtained from the workshop, it can be stated that a multi-future way of thinking and collective production contributes to imaginative free play in the architectural design process and is a proposal to architecture as a possible preparation for the future.

International Architecture News

The news section presents the winners of The Daylight Award 2020 and The Kaira Looro Competition, and announces the theme of The 2A Continental Architectural Awards 2020, which will be conducted virtually this year.

The Role of Architectural Awards for Enhancing Heritage-Based Graduation Projects Analytical Study of Tamayouz Excellence Award for Iraqi Students

The cultural heritage plays an important role in determining the identity of any community, and the architectural output is at the forefront of this subject since it‟s the direct visual product of a cumulative result of the experience led by the communities within a given time and place which is compatible with the cultural structure and social life.From this point of view, the academic curriculum in many architectural schools tries to enhance the students‟ vision for the cultural heritage by introducing that heritage as a main source of inspiration in the creation of their design product. This comes in various ways, most of which are based on the employing of visual elements and external details showing their impact on the facades of the design projects as a blind repetition of that legacy, while some schools are investigating more deeply the ideology behind the production of that legacy and direct their students to study the deep structure of that heritage and reproduce it differently from previous to more contemporary architecture.The process of evaluating student‟s architectural products supports those approaches of inspiring heritage-based projects as those processes considered as an evaluating means for the outputs. One of the most important sources for those evaluations were students‟ project competitions and awards, which play a vital role in implicitly inspiring the cultural values of that heritage. Tamayouz Excellence Award for Graduation Projects stands on the head of these awards for the final stage output of Iraqi students.This paper aims to investigate the extent to which the academic output of the students' products which were chosen as a shortlist by (Tamayouz Excellence Award for Iraqi Students) can reflect the iconic, canonic, pragmatic, and analogy depiction of that heritage, and thus its ability to create a product with a deep local cultural vision. This is done by examining those output of several Iraqi architectural final stage students by analyzing those projects according to the structural elements that formulate their concepts, to point out those trends that help the promoting out values of identity within their works.The research found that the projects which inspire the heritage were not the most likely to run for the final positions. The reason for this lies in the superficial approach in which these projects dealt with the heritage values, and the local culture has been limited to the inspiration of the just formal elements without going deeply into the intellectual depth of that heritage.

Architectural award schemes

PurposeBy promoting certain design values and priorities, institutionalized award schemes are here seen as important agents in the production and management of a more contemporary form of cultural heritage. The research presented compares the claims and actions of the designers and the evaluating committees regarding bioclimatic considerations in the design of award-winning houses in Cyprus. The analysis looks at the way the basic principles of bioclimatic design have indeed influenced the design and classifies each house for each of the principles considered.Design/methodology/approachHighly specialized or quantitative analysis is avoided since what is finally sought after is an evaluation procedure that can be effectively used by a committee composed of practicing architects rather than experts in any field.FindingsThe results suggest that bioclimatic principles do not have a strong impact in the design or in the evaluation by the committee. What this means is that the award systems promote an architectural culture that may use catchy terminology referring to bioclimatic design and sustainability, but they do not give much weight to such criteria when judging the quality of a project.Originality/valueThe originality of the research is twofold: it considers architectural award schemes as agents that currently play a role previously performed by the vernacular in the creation of architectural culture; the analysis tools used are designed in such a way to also be used in the proposal for an improved evaluation procedure.

Jan Reisner w Akademii św. Łukasza. Artysta a polityka króla Jana III i papieża Innocentego XI

Jan Reisner w Akademii św. Łukasza. Artysta a polityka króla Jana III i papieża Innocentego XI

A sustainable and fully automated process to treat stored rainwater to meet drinking water quality guidelines

Exponential growth of water demand and a decrease in usable freshwater due to various climate, environmental and anthropogenic events make rainwater harvesting a useful practice. According to Australian health regulations, drinking rainwater is low risk, if the roof catchment, collection system and storage are well maintained. The CSU Engineering building, which has received an architectural award for its sustainable design, produces its drinking water (3.7L/person/day) within the premises. Rainwater is collected from the roof catchment, stored outside the building and treated on demand at a fully transparent water treatment plant installed at the entrance of the building. The water treatment facility is fully powered by solar panels installed on the roof. The treatment process consists of several operations, including aeration, sand filtration, GAC adsorption and UV disinfection. The performance of the CSU Engineering water treatment plant for the past 30 months is discussed in this paper. Primary and secondary water quality parameters of treated water were well within Australian drinking water quality standards and showed better results than municipal water available in the host town. The aeration unit improved secondary water quality standards (odor and taste) and the adsorption process was effective for elimination of metals. The result of this experiment indicated that this process could be a promising solution for providing safe drinking water in remote Australia, including sessional demands in rest areas and caravan parks.

Baltic mikroraions and kolkhoz settlements within the Soviet architectural award system

The focus of this paper is how the Soviet architectural award system from the 1960s to the 1980s functioned in relation to the industrialisation of housing and planning for new types of residential units such as the mikroraion (large housing estate) in urban environments and kolkhoz (collective farm) settlements in rural areas. Despite the importance attached to mass housing declared by the Communist Party in 1955, the Soviet Union’s most prestigious state award, the Lenin Prize, was only ever conferred upon two model sites: the Lazdynai large housing estate in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1974, and the Juknaičiai soviet farm village in south-western Lithuania in 1988. The paper seeks to address several questions: What role did official awards play in the context of Soviet mass housing and new settlement planning ideology? How and why were certain (Baltic) sites selected and awarded? What aspects played a major role in both professional acknowledgment and the fulfilment of ideological requirements? The research is based on material held by the Russian State Archives for Literature and Arts in Moscow (RGALI), the Lithuanian National State Archives (LCVA), interviews with architects in Lithuania, and an overview of the contemporary Soviet press.

El Lugar de la arquitectura, una entrevista a Edward Rojas Vega

In 1977, with the establishment of the Puertazul (Blue Door) Architecture Workshop together with architect Renato Vivaldi, Edward Rojas Vega began an architectural production particularly focused on the condition of the insular culture. Among other things, this activity has collected and placed value on Chiloe’s architectural and cultural heritage, the permanent tension between tradition and modernity, the relentless search for a locally-based modernity and the dialogue with the Latin-American context. These concerns have brought about an uninterrupted professional practice of more than 40 years. For this reason, we took the focus of this interview away from the most recent events of his career to further encourage his reflections, and eventually, drive a new attempt for explanations which we hope will help our readers sift through the unique architectural universe of this profesional of southern Chile. His work has been displayed in publications, interviews, videos and exhibitions in Chile, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Spain, France, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Korea and China. In the academia, he was founder and director of Universidad ARCIS Patagonia, Castro (Chiloe), y and professor of Workshop X and Dissertations at Universidad ARCIS, in Castro and Santiago. He is professor of the Master’s Degree in Integrated Design - MIDA (Escuela de Arquitectura de la Universidad de Santiago), professor of the Master’s Degree in Environment and Latin American Bioclimatic Architecture (APUS Foundation and Universidad Politecnica de Madrid), professor of the ISTHMUS Workshop (Escuela de Arquitectura y Diseno de America Latina y el Caribe, Panama City), visiting professor of the Master’s Degree on Cultural Heritage (Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile) and professor of the Master’s Degree on Sustainable Environment Design - MADE (Universidad Austral de Chile). In 2015, he was appointed Professor Extraordinaire by Universidad Austral de Chile and in 2016 the Association of Architects of Chile honored him with the National Architecture Award. Currently, he can still be found working in his vaulted ceiling indoor workshop in a narrow alley of the city Castro, Chiloe.

GENESIS AND STAGES OF RENOVATION IN ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN PLANNING OF "NEW CITIES" BASED ON THE EXAMPLE OF AKTAU (SHEVCHENKO)

This article deals with the problems of cities built during the second half of the 20th century, which in the literature, are referred to as new. Today, they have changed or have not yet determined the city-forming vector of development, the basis of which was initially, as a rule, large-scale industrial complexes. The search for new ideas and design solutions lies in grounding scientific research and conducting design workshops to create a bank of architectural and town-planning proposals. Based on the example of the city of Shevchenko (now Aktau), a study of its architectural genesis and the phenomenon of the rapid implementation of a project, which received the highest architectural award, namely, the Patrick Abercrombie Prize, the modern strategy of renovation, and development of the city is considered. Positive experience requires study, and it can be applied to “new” cities and partially applied to historically formed cities.

ConstructiveAlps. Contemporaneità, sostenibilità, regionalità / ConstructiveAlps. Contemporaneity, sustainability, regionality

ConstructiveAlps, an award that takes on the thought of Mies Van der Rohe who says «True architecture is always objective and is the expression of the inner structure of our time»; not therefore an Alpine Architecture award but an award for sustainable architecture in the Alps that recognizes the responsibility of Architecture in the effects of climate change. So “constructive” means useful, effective, concrete. 1300 architectures in 4 editions judged by holistic criteria considering energy efficiency, appropriate technologies, use of local and coherent materials, embodied energy, life cycles, sobriety, restraint, impact on the landscape, soil consumption and healthiness, life’s quality, building costs and public transport. The winning projects are absolutely necessary architectures, multifunctional, wooden, with very high energy performances but also social and cultural, able to encourage the communities maintenance in the alpine territories, are civil architecture able to have physical and figurative centrality, to be a reference for the rebirth of places with abandonment risk. Making sustainable architecture facilitate new regionality with a glocal attitude that enhance cultural differences.

Getting under the(ir) skin: Applying personas and scenarios with body-environment research for improved understanding of users’ perspective in architectural design

The aim of this paper is to move established positions in architectural design by discussing a more refined user perspective. The motivation is threefold. Firstly, fields like environmental psychology and cognitive science for architecture have in recent years brought novel insights on the embodied nature of human spatial experience, and the extensive effects of the built environment on people’s psychosomatic health and behaviour that are not well-captured by existing building standardization systems. Secondly, while the fast growing trends of user-centred and research-based design in architecture have showed that users’ experience is a valuable source of design knowledge, the methods for incorporating this wealth of new insights in the architectural design process are still underdeveloped. Finally, the example of the newly built psychiatric department in Aabenraa, Denmark, whose interior, despite an international architectural award in 2016, had to be re-designed one year after construction due to poor understanding of the users, indicates existing discrepancies in the current approaches to translating research information in user-centred design. To address these issues, we discuss the experiences from a new masters’ course in ‘Architecture, Health, and Well-being’ and propose that user-centred methods like ‘personas’ and ‘scenarios’ used in IT, marketing, and product development also have a potential to develop more in-depth research-informed user perspectives. As well as, to help students envision and strengthen the architectural quality of the programming and building design throughout the architectural design process, by supporting a ‘design empathic’ understanding and immersion in user perspectives.

Crowdsourced and crowd-pleasing: the new architectural awards and the city

A new system of architectural recognition, rooted in web-based design awards, is poised to impact city branding by redefining what constitutes popular architecture. This paper uses a qualitative discourse analysis of crowdsourced architecture awards, such as ArchDaily’s Building of the Year, to show how hierarchies of recognition are flattening, becoming more transnational and increasingly democratic. The production and consumption of recognition are tied to place branding by the idea of symbolic capital. It is argued that a shift is taking place in the fame that architects leverage to become the sought-after designers of our cities.