Awards: The Latest Architecture and News

AIA Shanghai is pleased to announce its first ever awards program to celebrate China's best design and designers; a benchmark for international excellence.

Brussels-based architecture firm 51N4E have won first prize for their Skanderbeg Square project in Tirana, Albania. The European Prize for Urban Public Space is a biennale competition that promotes creating, restoring, and improving public spaces within European cities, and have chosen this year’s winners for their impressive transformation of the city’s central square.

51N4E’s restructuring and renovation of the Skanderbeg Square is a result of winning an international architecture competition back in 2008. After the project was paused in 2010 for administrative changes, and resumed in 2015, the end result is a series of urban interventions, “inviting public and semi-public neighboring functions to spread into the exterior space”.

+ 33

The Architectural Awards are very important for the architectural industry, and for innovative architectural design in general, and as an organization responsible for global architectural awarding, "Abdullatif Al Fozan Award for Mosque Architecture" believes that this award will lead to unexpected change in the architectural design of mosques and will end the developed conceptuality of mosques. However, because it is relatively new, both intellectuals and practitioners are still uncertain about the aims of this award either because of being targeting mosques or because of the process of reviewing those nominated designs. So, "Abdullatif Al Fozan Award for Mosque Architecture – AFAMA" is currently working on decreasing the percentage of this "uncertainty" by clearly defining aims and requirements of this award, and this is what AFAMA is planning to achieve within the upcoming 3rd cycle (2017-2020).

+ 6

"Moriyama-San" - a film by Bêka & Lemoine - has been awarded the 2018 Best Prize at the Arquiteturas Film Festival in Lisbon. Centered around the famous Moriyama House by Pritzker Prize Laureate Ryue Nishizawa, it becomes part of a developing series called “Living Architectures,” in which the filmmakers aim to “put into question the fascination with the picture, which covers up the buildings with preconceived ideas of perfection, virtuosity, and infallibility.” In its unique approach, the film “masterfully combines image, sound, and narrative in a compelling story about a unique character and its relation to his house and music.”

+ 16

As part of the 5th edition of the Lisbon Architecture Triennale program, this call invites architecture students to engage in deep thought, in an exercise of collective research on constructive rationality. This competition for ideas is open to master degree students from worldwide architecture schools. A selection of proposals will be part of the exhibition “Natural Beauty”, curated by Tristan Chadney and Laurent Esmilaire, alongside a genealogy of works, from the 16th century to the present, that relate to constructive rationality.

With more than 590,000 submissions in 2017, the EyeEm Photography Awards is the world's largest photography competition for discovering new talents.

The 2018 EyeEm Awards feature nine categories, including a category focused on architecture: "The Architect" where we encourage you to submit interesting lines, shapes, and beautiful spaces in architecture.

THEME

NOVA DESIGN AWARD: Future Living Space

THE BRIEF

We live in a time of great change. As paradigmatic shifts in technology, social networks and the physical environment constantly reshape our way of living, we can foresee that the living space of the future in 10 or even 5 years will be drastically different from what it is today.

How will we live in 2025 with updated basic needs and redefined living spaces? Perhaps, physical space and distance will further give way to digital connectivity, while inter-personal relationships will be complicated by our latest affair with artificial intelligence. Or, unsustainable urban development and the celebration of all things virtual will come to a halt and humans will engage in a renewed conversation with each other and the environment.

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected eleven recipients in its 2018 Small Projects Awards. Established fifteen years ago by AIA’s Small Project Practitioners, the program “recognizes small-project practitioners for the high quality of their work” and “aims at raising awareness about the value and design excellence that architects can bring to projects, no matter their size or scope.”

+ 18

Videos

The Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat have announced the winners of the 16th edition of the CTBUH Tall Building Awards. From over 48 finalists in 28 countries, the best buildings from four regions – the Americas, Asia & Australasia, Europe, and Middle East & Africa – were selected, along with recipients of the Urban Habitat Award, the Innovation Award, the Construction Award and the 10 Year Award. From these finalists, the CTBUH has also awarded the Best Tall Building Worldwide to the Oasia Hotel Downtown by WOHA.

The towers were chosen by a panel of architects from world-renowned firms and were judged on every aspect of performance, looking in particular for those which “have made extraordinary contributions to the advancement of tall buildings and the urban environment, and that achieve sustainability at the highest and broadest level.”

+ 6

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) announced the winners of their 18th annual Housing Awards, which recognize the best in housing design for new constructions, restorations, and renovations. This year the five-person jury selected eleven projects to receive awards in four categories: one- and two-family custom residences; one- and two-family production homes; multifamily housing; and specialized housing.

+ 60

The Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) has announced the 31 winning schemes for the “2018 Outstanding Projects” award, chosen from 200 nominations. Awarded on a biennial basis, the awards seek to recognize the most distinguished architectural works built on the continents of North and South America.

The 31 projects will now form a shortlist for the MCHAP Prize, with winners to be announced in July 2018. Hosted by the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), the winner will be honored in a grand prize ceremony at Mies van der Rohe’s iconic Crown Hall in October. In the last series, top honors went to SANAA's Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut, USA.

The New York City Public Design Commission and Mayor Bill de Blasio have announced the 11 projects selected as winners of their 2018 Awards for Excellence in Design. Established in 1983, the award has been bestowed annually to projects from the city’s five boroughs that “exemplify how innovative and thoughtful design can provide New Yorkers with the best possible public spaces and services and engender a sense of civic pride.”

The 2018 awards recognized projects which responded to the de Blasio Administration’s commitment to providing an “equitable, resilient, and diverse city for all New Yorkers.” All five New York boroughs feature in the awards, with schemes encompassing education, culture, art, and recreation.

+ 7

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and the Committee on the Environment (COTE) have announced the winners of the COTE Top Ten Awards, the highest honor for buildings that exemplify great design and sustainable performance. The award, now in its 22^nd year, celebrates 10 projects that meet COTE’s rigorous standards for 10 criteria in several areas of design including economic, social, and ecological value. The winners will be honored in June at the AIA Conference in New York City.

Read about the 2018 winners after the break.

Get ready to add to your reading and watch lists because the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) just announced the 2018 award recipients for the SAH Publication, Film and Video Awards. Winners received their awards at SAH’s 71st Annual International Conference awards ceremony on April 20th in Saint Paul, Minnesota. The list of SAH Award recipients represents some of the best media in architectural, urban, and landscape history, as well as historic preservation scholarship and architectural exhibition catalogs. Nominations for the 2019 awards will be accepted by SAH on June 1st of this year.

See the list of this year's SAH Award recipients below.

Thirteen projects have been announced as winners of Docomomo US’ 2018 Modernism in America Awards, honoring projects within the United States that highlight and advocate for the restoration of postwar architecture and landscapes.

Now in its fifth year, the Modernism in America Awards were founded to celebrate "the people and projects working to preserve, restore and rehabilitate our modern heritage sensitively and productively. The program seeks to advance those preservation efforts; to increase appreciation for the period and to raise awareness of the on-going threats against modern architecture and design."

Below, we have rounded up the successful schemes, and an organizer’s description of their significance.

+ 10

Videos

The spatial investigation group Forensic Architecture has been nominated for the 2018 Turner Prize. Based at Goldsmiths University in London, the interdisciplinary group of architects, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers, and scientists have devoted their energy to investigating state and corporate violations worldwide.

The nomination represents the second time a team of spatial designers has been recognized by the prize in its three-decade history, following on from 2015 winners Assemble.

+ 2

Indoors frame how we grow - how we dwell - how we live. They are an inseparable part to a human life and furniture form a very crucial component of how this experience grows on us.

British architect Sir David Adjaye, Founding Principal of Adjaye Associates, will be honored as this year’s recipient of the Louis I. Kahn Memorial Award by the Center for Architecture and Design in Philadelphia. The annual award celebrates the achievements of an individual who has made a significant contribution to the field of architecture, while also celebrating the achievements of influential Philadelphia-based architect Louis Kahn.

Past recipients of the award have included Bjarke Ingels, Norman Foster, Peter Bohlin, Daniel Libeskind, Robert A.M. Stern, Rafael Viñoly and César Pelli.