Awards History

A Chronicle of Sustainable Construction

Browse previous Holcim Awards competition cycles that showcase the important role that architecture, engineering, urban planning, and the building industry have in achieving a more sustainable future.

Holcim Awards 2023

Five Holcim Awards Gold winners champion approaches ranging from adaptive reuse and material circularity to participatory design and cooperative business models. Fifteen further prizes awarded, illustrating the breadth of diverse and innovative real-world approaches to creating a more sustainable built environment.

The Holcim Foundation has announced the winners of its international Holcim Awards for 2023, underscoring the breadth of diverse and innovative real-world approaches to transforming the built environment. From the bustling streets of Madrid to heritage conservation efforts in China, the winning projects – awarded prize money totaling USD 1 million – exemplify the growing global effort to provide holistic design and construction responses that advance multiple aspects of sustainable development.
6th Awards Cycle

Barbara Buser (left), baubüro in situ, Basel and Zurich, Switzerland receives the Global Holcim Awards Gold trophy as a member of the winning team for Extending the Cycle in Switzerland from Hashim Sarkis, Head of the Global Holcim Awards jury 2021

The issue of sustainability is of paramount importance in construction. In view of climate change and diminishing resources, new approaches are needed along the entire value chain of the construction industry as the building sector moves toward net-zero emissions and circular material flows.
5th Awards Cycle

Global LafargeHolcim Awards 2018 winners at the handover event in Mexico City (l-r): Bronze – Eric Mahoney and Constance Bodurow, studio[Ci], USA; Gold – Loreta Castro, Taller Capital and Manuel Perló, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Mexico; and Silver – Mariam Kamara, Atelier Masomi, Niger and Yasaman Esmaili, Studio Chahar, Iran.

The 5th International LafargeHolcim Awards attracted more than 5,000 projects and visions in sustainable construction to be implemented in 131 countries. 1,836 projects passed the formal and quality checks and were assessed by independent juries in five regions of the world.
4th Awards Cycle

UVA de La Imaginación designed by Colectivo720 for EPM Group (Empresas Públicas de Medellín) won the Global Holcim Awards Gold 2015. The project in Medellín, Colombia, centers on creating high quality public spaces inserted into low-income, dense neighborhoods at a reservoir where two giant water tanks have been replaced by new infrastructure.

All three Global Awards winners in 2015 recognize architectural interventions that deliver tangible benefits to local communities: Turning a decommissioned water reservoir into a park in Medellín, rebuilding social fabric through a community library in Ambepussa following Sri Lanka’s civil war, and creating public zones and flood-protection for the island of Manhattan.
3rd Awards Cycle

The secondary school in Gando village, Burkina Faso by Kéré Architecture won the Holcim Awards Gold 2012. The project uses traditional building materials and technologies and places great emphasis on actively involving the local population in the construction process. Locally-sourced clay is mixed with aggregates and cement to cast walls on-site based on a two-piece formwork.

A school project in Gando, Burkina Faso; a multifunctional community center in São Paulo, Brazil; and an urban renewal plan in Berlin, Germany are the winners of the Global Holcim Awards for 2012. The finalists were the regional Holcim Awards 2011 winning projects that had been selected from more than 6,000 entries in 146 countries.
2nd Awards Cycle

The Holcim Award Gold 2009 aims to revitalize the heavily polluted and neglected River Fez. The urban plan by Bureau EAST returns to this ancient heart its dynamic soul so that the Moroccan city’s renewal and improved life quality will follow.

Four Global Holcim Awards were announced in 2009 for a river remediation scheme in Morocco, a greenfield university campus in Vietnam, a rural planning strategy in China, and a shelter for day laborers in the USA. A series of prize-handovers were held at the site of each project to celebrate the winners and their highly-acclaimed examples of sustainable construction. Almost 5,000 sustainable construction projects and visions from 121 countries entered the five regional Holcim Awards competitions in 2008.
1st Awards Cycle

One of the two projects that won a Holcim Award Gold 2006 is a plan to improve the shanty village of San Rafael-Unido in Caracas, Venezuela by Proyectos Arqui. (l-r): Isabel Cecilia Pocaterra, Victor Eduardo Gastier, Silvia Soonets & Maria Inés Pocaterra.

The first cycle of the Holcim Awards for Sustainable Construction came to a furious finale in the Thai capital Bangkok – with an array of leading-edge projects, many smiling winners, and 700 enthusiastic guests from over 50 countries. Two Global Holcim Awards Gold, a Silver, and a Bronze prize were presented for construction projects in Venezuela, Germany, Italy and Canada. The four winning projects cover the entire spectrum of sustainable construction and impressively demonstrate the quality of the inaugural competition, in which originally over 3,000 projects were submitted from around the world.