European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award

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Salt House is located on the edge of the Pavilosta historical center where all the streets cross at perpendicular angles on a grid that abuts the sea. Pāvilosta has a temperate climate and strong wind, so the building was constructed with thick, monolithic, lime-plastered blocks, with no additional insulation necessary. The cross-section of the one-story building was inspired by traditional fishermen's houses prevalent in the area, with an interior that opens to the building’s full height and width.

BANKHOTEL is located in the reconstructed historic building of the former Austro-Hungarian Bank. At the heart of our planning solutions is the idea of the fullest possible preservation of the building’s authenticity. Valuable elements have been restored and combined delicately with contemporary design.

From the beginning for our studio it was important to design a villa that had to be contextualized so that the house would be stretched out and placed inside the location.

The Local Activity Center is a project that aims to create a space that would be the focal point for the life of the local residents and enable them to integrate. The architecture of the background, modest and blending into the surroundings, creating space rather than being the visible cubature itself.

The Conservatory of Music is at the heart of a much broader public project.It serves as a catalyst for a refined urban lifestyle, breathing new life into the entire public pedestrian space. The use of massive stone in the construction is a striking environmental performance. With little transformation at a nearby source, it makes for a low carbon footprint.

Replacing a dilapidated single-storey dwelling sited between two of Malta’s most beloved villages, Threeplusone takes cues from its surrounding context whilst addressing contemporary living needs, prioritising light, space and functionality. The building responds stylistically to its inherited street-scape, echoing the elegance of massing, volume, and proportion of a Modernist corner house that sits across the road from its site.

A compact volume café house is designed in a small site of Anykščiai (Lithuania) old town, which is protected cultural heritage. There was a wooden one storey house with an attic until it was demolished in the end of the last century and for some time the plot was empty. Nevertheless, the senior house became a reason for the new one.

This contemporary house, built with a single material - concrete, is one of the first of its kind in this region and sets a precedent for others. Located on the sloped landscape in a highly populated neighborhood of Tbilisi Hills, the house is elevated above the street level, being invisible to the surroundings and open to the views of Caucasus mountains. 

Almost a decade ago, I accidentally came across a beautiful industrial waste material – gray sandstone slabs with countless irregular cuts. For many years I was looking for an adequate design opportunity to take advantage of this singular material. Finally, I found the right project in the city of Oświęcim, where it became the leitmotiv of the Memorial Park, symbolizing the ruins of the now defunct Great Synagogue (1863-1939) and the paths of life of the multicultural community that were once criss-crossing in this place. References to the temple demolished 80 years ago take on various forms in the new project. The outline of the former synagogue is marked by a narrow curb, separating the interior of the park from the dense greenery surrounding it.

In the case of the St. Lucas school of arts in Antwerp, Atelier Kempe Thill was confronted with a very low building budget as a starting point.  In addition, the client asked for a complex space program that had to be partly integrated into an existing building.  In order to manage the reduction of the demands, optimisation on various levels and general minimalism have been major design criteria. The new house has been developed in collaboration with the various users of the institute to create contemporary conditions for education in arts. The aim was to use the new building as a means to re-organise the education process as well as the institute itself, to prepare it for the challenges of the 21st century. 

A soft integration in the landscape accompanies the development of the city. Neither in the center of the town nor really on its outskirts, regarding the urban development of the northern part of the street Pierres, blanches, the location of the project offers the opportunity to reinforce the development of the city by asserting the public character of this facilities and equipment.

The project pursues a resilient idea in the compression of a single-family house volume into three apartments with a total of 9 inhabitants, 6 adults, and 3 children, each with the qualities of a single-family house in the design approach. The aim of the project is not linear system optimization and energy efficiency, but a maximum sufficiency approach, creative reduction as a design principle. A new, fundamentally resource-saving and social approach is to be shown to the typology of the single-family house, which questions issues such as land consumption, individuality and flexibility of living, densification, age-appropriate and multi-generational living and would like to show a possible solution, especially in rural areas. In this way, an age-appropriate apartment on the ground floor, a two-story apartment with roof terraces, and an end-row house were created in a single-family house.

Any kind of intervention in this space should not interfere with the existing one. More than proposing it was necessary to omit, more than designing it was necessary to recover and integrate, more than composing it was necessary to be simple and silent with rigour in response to new needs.

The social housing neighbourhood of São João de Deus, was originally adapted to a layout that followed the British design parameters of the ‘Garden City’ movement: small scale buildings, arranged rationally and in a fragmented way over the ground, following the nature of the topography and adapting to sun exposure, configured in a concentric plan. 

The City Cemetery is designed as a forest park – a green oasis in the residential area.  Therefore, it is no longer a strictly monofunctional structure.

On the border of the historical flea market in Saint-Ouen, this small mixed-use building – architecture studio office and collective housing, is set in a typical suburban fabric, defined by heterogeneous and relatively low-rise buildings. The very first difficulty in the project conception was to integrate the building in the small plot of land while respecting as much as possible its residential environment. The graduating height of the five-story volume makes it possible to associate a dwelling to the north and a townhouse to the south. The footprint leaves free space to a 50 m² courtyard which represents a breathing space into the dense fabric and creates a transparency towards the city.

The main idea of the building was to fit into the surrounding environment, also creating a completely new context for the city of Narva. The architectural concept consists of two parts. The first deals with the connection between the typology and the location of the building, and the second with the form in which the strict uniform structure of the building and the contrasting flexible change of the landscape meet.