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Architects: DELORDINAIRE
- Year: 2024


For almost four decades, ABB, the Swedish-Swiss multinational leader in electrical engineering, has been at the cutting edge of innovation and expertise. A standout initiative in their portfolio is the Frozen Music video series, a video series showcasing exceptional architectural projects and the architects who create them. As Katrin Förster, Global Key Account Manager at ABB, explains, 'When producing an episode for Frozen Music, I always begin by sending a bespoke questionnaire to the architect.' For Episode #24, a conversation with Mustafa Chehabeddine, Design Director at KPF, helped shape the narrative, emphasizing the formal and functional qualities of Ziraat Bank's new headquarters in Istanbul.

The OBEL Award is an international prize for architectural practice, presented annually by the Henrik Frode Obel Foundation. The jury, composed of representatives from firms such as Snøhetta and MVRDV, alongside professionals from other disciplines, selects a theme to guide the choice of winners for each edition. The goal is to steer proposals toward solutions that foster dialogue and generate knowledge on emerging issues, aiming to promote architecture in service of social and ecological development worldwide. For its seventh edition, the 2025 call focus is Ready Made, targeting projects that place reuse and repurposing at the core of architecture for the common good.

The concept of "sponge cities" has gained prominence since it was introduced by Chinese landscape architect Kongjian Yu, founder of Turenscape, and was officially adopted as a national policy in China in 2013 to combat urban flooding. This approach prioritizes nature-based infrastructure such as wetlands, rain gardens, and permeable pavements, creating landscapes with porous soil where native plants can thrive with minimal maintenance. When it rains, these systems absorb and slow down water flow, reducing flood risks. In contrast, traditional concrete- and pipe-based drainage solutions, though widely used, are costly, rigid, and require frequent maintenance, sometimes even making cities more vulnerable to flooding due to blockages and overflows.



