Awards: The Latest Architecture and News

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced its longlist of 30 buildings to be considered for the inaugural RIBA International Prize. According to the organization, “Projects range from large urban infrastructure schemes to private residential projects; cultural destinations to civic spaces; academic buildings to places of worship. The RIBA International Prize will be awarded to the most significant and inspirational building of the year. The winning building will demonstrate visionary, innovative thinking and excellence of execution, whilst making a distinct contribution to its users and to its physical context.” This is the first RIBA Award to be open to any qualified architect in the world.

The 30 long-listed buildings will be visited over the summer by the RIBA awards committee, after which, the list will be reduced to 20 winners of RIBA Awards for International Excellence. Subsequently, six finalists will be chosen and visited by a Grand Jury in the fall. According to RIBA, “[Awards for International Excellence] will be given to buildings worldwide that stretch the boundaries of architecture. Irrespective of style, complexity and size of both scheme and budget successful projects should demonstrate visionary or innovative thinking and excellence of execution.” The Grand Jury is being lead by Richard Rogers and includes Billie Tsien, Kunlé Adeyemi, Philip Gumuchdjian, and Marilyn Jordan Taylor.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced 17 winners for its RIBA South Awards, which recognize architectural excellence. These 17 regional award winners were drawn from a shortlist of 30 projects. Over the next few months, they will be considered for the RIBA National Awards, and then for the RIBA Stirling Prize.

The 17 winners of the RIBA South East Awards are:

Videos

The Aga Khan Award for Architecture has announced a shortlist of 19 projects selected from 348 entries received from 69 countries. Presented once every three years, the award honors new standards of excellence in contemporary design, social housing, community improvement and development, historic preservation, reuse and area conservation, as well as landscape design and improvement of the environment. The basis for the Aga Khan Award is “to identify and encourage building concepts that successfully address the needs and aspirations of communities in which Muslims have a significant presence.” Selected by a Master Jury, the shortlisted projects will compete for $1 million dollars in prize money. Since its establishment in 1977, over 110 projects have received the award and more than 9,000 building projects have been documented.

From a shortlist of 68 buildings, 36 London projects have been awarded the 2016 RIBA London Awards for architectural excellence, the city's most prestigious design honor. The winners include a home for ravens, a Japanese-inspired London terrace home and a historical restoration. All of these designs will be further considered for the RIBA National Awards, to be announced in July. The winners of the national award will then create a shortlist for the RIBA Stirling Prize – the highest award for architecture in the UK.

The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has announced six winners for its RIBA South East Awards, which recognize architectural excellence in the regions of Kent, Surrey, East Sussex, West Sussex and the Channel Islands. These winners will be considered for a RIBA National Award, which will be announced on June 23. Winners of the National Award will then be eligible for the RIBA Stirling Prize later in the year.

The six winners of the RIBA South East Awards are:

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) and its Committee on the Environment (COTE) have selected the top ten sustainable architecture and ecological design projects for 2016.

Now in its 20th year, the COTE Top Ten Awards program honors projects that protect and enhance the environment through an integrated approach to architecture, natural systems, and technology.

A recently released study, entitled Lessons from the Leading Edge, reports that design projects recognized through this program are “outpacing the industry by virtually every standard of performance.”

The 2016 COTE Top Ten Green Projects are:

Terra Award, the first international prize for contemporary earthen architectures, has released a shortlist of 40 projects competing for awards in nine categories. The finalists selected span five continents and 67 countries. Each entry was evaluated on a range of topics including: architectural quality and landscape integration, environmental approach and energy performance, creativity and innovation, technical performance, local economy and social intensity, and showcasing of skills. Project materials range from light clay to cob, poured earth, wattle and daub, compressed earth block (CEB), adobe, rammed earth, and others.

+ 7

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) has announced the winners of the 2016 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video as part of their annual International Conference Awards ceremony in Pasadena, California.

Awarded annually, the SAH Publication awards honor excellence in "architectural history, landscape history, and historic preservation scholarship," alongside outstanding architectural exhibition catalogs. Eligible publications must have been published in the two years immediately preceding the award, with nominations for the 2017 Publication Awards and SAH Award for Film & Video opening on June 1, 2016

Learn more about the winning publications after the break.

LEAF International (Leading European Architecture Forum) has announced Santiago Calatrava as the recipient of its 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award. Recognized by a panel of industry experts around the world, he has been selected for his “unique vision and ability to transform cities through impactful design" as well as the breadth of his work, which includes projects like the World Trade Center Transportation Hub (New York City), Milwaukee Art Museum (Milwaukee, Wisconsin), Museum of Tomorrow (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Florida Polytechnic Building (Lakeland, Florida) and the Turning Torso Tower (Malmö, Sweden).

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has selected ten recipients for the 2016 Housing Awards. The AIA’s Housing Awards program, now in its 16th year, was established to recognize "the best in housing design and promote the importance of good housing as a necessity of life."

The 2016 AIA Housing Award recipients include:

Jennifer Siegal, founder of Los Angeles-based Office of Mobile Design (OMD), has been announced as the winner of the fourth arcVision Prize – Women and Architecture, an international award to women’s architecture organized by Italcementi. Siegal was unanimously chosen by the jury for being “a fearless pioneer in the research and development of prefabricated construction systems, at low prices for disadvantaged users and areas, who has been able to invent and build practical solutions and a new language for mobile and low-cost housing."

"Innovation and unconventional thinking are both hardwired into my DNA. This shows in my body of work and research that questions everything, particularly the static, heavy, inflexible architecture that we somehow still expect in a world that is anything but," said Siegal in a press release.

Thomas Heatherwick has been selected to receive the Tribeca Film Festival's (TFF) 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award. Part of the TFF's seventh annual Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards (TDIA), the Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Heatherwick for his "dedication to bringing design, architecture and urban planning together in a single workspace at his own Heatherwick Studio." He will be presented the award alongside Kenya Wildlife Service Chair and leading paleoanthropologist and conservationist Dr. Richard Leakey.

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) has announced Phyllis Lambert, architect and CCA Founding Director Emeritus, as the winner of the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize 2016 Architecture Awards from The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. The $20,000 prize is given to an architect of any nationality who has made a significant contribution to architecture as an art.

Lambert "is the conscience of modern and contemporary architecture, protecting its past and advocating for its future as a vital art form," said jury chairman Elizabeth Diller.