At an event held on 25 April in Brussels, Mr. Georg Häusler, director for Culture, Creativity and Sport of the European Commission, together with Mr. Fréderic Druot, president of the 2024 jury, announced the Winners of the 2024 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Awards.
The 2024 Winner of the Architecture Prize is the Study Pavilion on the campus of the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany, by architects Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke, both with studios in Berlin. The client is the Technische Universität Braunschweig.
It is rewarded for its ability to challenge the constraints and imagery of sustainability, creating a welcoming and playful environment for study, collaboration and community gathering through an uncompromising and carefully detailed structure. It has taken a clear architectural idea, scrutinized it and pushed it to the limit; more than being a building, it could be understood as a versatile system, merging technological inventions with a flexible and reusable principle.
The authors, Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke, founded their studios in 2015 and won the competition to build the study centre in 2015. They are the youngest winners of the EUmies Awards Architecture Prize.
The 2024 Winner of the Emerging Architecture Prize is the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona by SUMA arquitectura founded by Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano in Madrid. The client is the Barcelona City Council – BIMSA.
The library acts at the scale of the city, contributing to the transformation of the neighbourhood by opening up as a new exterior and interior public space. This wooden structure unfolds as a rich sequence of monumental and domestic spaces that welcome neighbours and citizens, providing them with comfortable atmospheres and community engagement. With meticulous attention to detail, the authors have thoroughly for learning, teamwork, examined and pushed the library programme to its fullest potential.
The authors, Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano founded their studio SUMA Arquitectura in 2005 and won the competition to build the library in 2015.
Following the selection of five finalist works for the Architecture Prize, the jury engaged in extensive deliberation to determine the winner among these works. After intense exchanges of opinions and different stances, they considered that Hage, the Colegio Reggio and the Technische Universität Braunschweig promote mindset changes in the current social, ecological and political context, while the Plato Contemporary Art Gallery and the Rebirth of the Convent Saint-François touch upon significant aspects concerning heritage, landscape and public space.
The Hage by Brendeland & Kristoffersen in cooperation with Price & Myers, a mystical garden on the outskirts of Lund, strives to preserve a small natural area, currently agricultural, around which a residential neighbourhood will rise very soon. Three brick walls and a roof all built using traditional methods such as the recovery of the rivet system to fasten the steel, create a place for reflection on architecture's relationship with time, urban development principles, and the design of community gathering spaces.
The Colegio Reggio by Andrés Jaque - Office for Political Innovation, a vertical school on the outskirts of Madrid, seeks its place in the face of the privatisation of education and questions architecture, pedagogy, and education. The school is the result of an idiosyncratic imagery, spatial richness, and built around a very special pedagogical system.
The works of Plato Contemporary Art Gallery in Ostrava by KWK Promes | Robert Konieczny and the Rehabilitation and extension of the convent Saint-François in Santa Lucia di Tallano by Amelia Tavella, as well as the Square and Tourist Office in Piódão by Branco-del Rio Arquitectos (Emerging finalist), preserve an indispensable European cultural heritage – industrial, landscape and urban – granting it a new life that attracts local communities as well as those from neighbouring territories.
The finalist and winning works form an inseparable whole to better understand the paths that contemporary architecture takes to confront sustainability, social equity, technological advancements, health and well-being, cultural preservation, resilience and adaptation, economic viability, and globalization within an ethical practice and both ideologically and pragmatically.
The EUmies Awards Day including the Awards Ceremony, will take place on 14 May 2024, at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and Palau Victòria Eugènia in Barcelona, launching the Barcelona Architecture Weeks.
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Press release and photos courtesy of Fundació Mies van der Rohe
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