News

French architect Jean-Pierre Pranlas-Descours and his team lead this Holcim Awards winner, in association with the French Scientific & Technical Building Centre (CSTB). The proposal for sustainable urbanisation 50km south-east of Lanzhou in China will preserve both traditional villages and agrarian land. It also offers new water-management solutions in an increasingly arid area.

The Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction held a workshop with a hand-selected group of next generation experts to plot future challenges and ideas on transforming the built environment. In a first-of-its kind event for the Holcim Foundation, the workshop brought together the 11 members of its Next Generation Accelerator (NGX) group representing ten countries and five continents – to develop suggestions for the Foundation’s future strategy and activities. 

This Holcim Awards winner by Riwaq aims to bring back traditional know-how, reconnect communities over sustainable practices and equip women and workers with transferable skills. These social and environmental goals will be achieved by repurposing a ruined historical site in East Jerusalem to create a public forum and cultural centre. 

This Holcim Awards winner by Medellin-based architects Connatural aims to salvage a badly damaged 5.5km-long wetland in Bogotá, Colombia. The vision to transform the wetland into a socially and ecologically significant park brings together art, architecture, and landscape design.

This Holcim Awards winner originates from a collaboration between Michael Sorkin Studio and non-profit Blacks In Green. Their shared vision to transform a problematic neighbourhood of Chicago into a “sustainable square mile” focusses on improving housing affordability and empowering collaboration between residents.

This Holcim Awards winner shows how to turn design processes upside-down in favour of circular construction. Architects baubüro in situ and partners salvaged most of the components in this high-quality building conversion from demolition sites.

Diébédo Francis Kéré, architect, educator and social activist, has been selected as the 2022 Laureate of the Pritzker Architecture Prize. His pioneering approach to architecture creates projects that are sustainable to the earth and its inhabitants - and delivers innovative solutions in lands of extreme scarcity.

Laura Viscovich is replacing Edward Schwarz as Head of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction. Edward Schwarz wished to retire in 2022 after more than 30 years of service in the Holcim Group, including the establishment and development of the Foundation since 2003. 

In fulfillment of its motto to ‘live well by design’, the mission of Urban Splash, which Tom Bloxham describes as ‘a market-leading urban regeneration developer’ to which he is both founder and chairman, is to build beautiful, modern homes in green neighbourhoods that are full of character. Going through the history of Urban Splash and its work, which includes the creation of over 4,000 new homes, Bloxham took the seminar’s attendees through an overlook of the design firm’s most notable regenerative projects, including the transformation of historic structures such as Concert Square in Liverpool and Lister Mills in Bradford.

As Workshop Mentor Dirk Hebel pointed out, “mainstream building practices are unsustainable. The construction sector uses an extensive amount of material resources and is responsible for the use of material compounds that are harmful to both humans and the environment. It is not enough to talk about more efficient steps to take within the existing systems, but time for a real paradigm shift.”

by Dirk Hebel, Workshop Mentor & Professor of Sustainable Construction, Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany & Member of the Academic Committee, Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction

According to the surveys released by the European Union (EU) in 2020, the construction industry is responsible for 40% of global CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, 50% of primary energy consumption, 50% of primary raw materials used and 36% of produced solid waste. Mainstream building practices are unsustainable.

In the material world we live in today, it is becoming widely known and accepted that what we use to build our cities have a far-reaching impact. With this in mind, how can designers, architects and engineers find scalable solutions that adequately respond to the material problems we face? Questions such as this were posed by Stuart Smith, director of Arup Berlin, to the audience of his seminar at the Norman Foster Foundation.

Speaking on her experiences as the former minister of urban renewal and informal settlements in Cairo, Egypt, where materials discarded by the rich constitute the informal waste-management industry of the urban poor, Laila Iskandar’s seminar referenced one of Egypt’s six principle recycling neighborhoods, Manchiyet Nasser, and the waste management system carried out there by its inhabitants.

“Architecture must arouse, inspire and feed the human spirit. The need is for professional concern with the environment and an improved quality of human life for all people.” Alongside a series of other inspiring quotes, Brinda Somaya began her seminar under the premise that, beyond building, architects must act as guardians of both the built and the natural environment.

To begin her seminar, Anna Heringer stated that, while architecture can be used as a tool to improve lives, unfortunately, the opposite is also true. Because the act of building consumes many resources and involves significant budgets that, in turn, impact society, she claimed that architects have an enormous responsibility to not only construct buildings, but to foster communities that occur in harmony with nature.

Presenting his renowned work at Better Shelter, a nonprofit company that builds shelters for displacement settlements created in response to warzone conflict and natural crises, Johan Karlsson offered an intensely provocative reconsideration of the relationship between architecture and the humanitarian system. In opposition to the precedent set by traditional shelter architecture, where temporality and impersonality often prevail, Karlsson asked, “Can we build shelters that are able to not only stand against the next hurricane, but to feel like home?”

by Angela Bai, Dev Desai and Sebastian Hitchcock

Looking initially at the most cherished part of the home, the living room, the first group was inspired by the spatial efficiencies and urban intensity of Mumbai, and, specifically, the incremental building practices of the neighbouring families who often build their homes piece by piece. In particular, their invention aimed to provide long-term housing for the migrant worker trying to find employment in the city.

by Nicolas Ayoub, Aarti Dhingra, Claudia Eugenin and Kiley Feickert

Focusing on a concrete high-rise located in Kendall Square of the Massachussett’s Institute of Technology (MIT)’s campus in Cambridge, MA, the third group’s intervention was done with student housing in mind, aiming to create a highly-personalisable, yet private space for shorter-term residents.

by Ophélie Férédie, German Ferradas and Elao Martin

The second group was inspired by the frequently used outdoor space in San Francisco, a region of Córdoba in Argentina, focusing, in particular, on the flexibility of uses with the objective of providing a first home for couples and small families within the working to middle class over the medium term.

Carme Pinós opened her seminar by expressing her conception of the city, the ‘articulated city’, which envisions architecture as the space of relationships and the city itself as the space in which human beings create a sense of community. Presenting various projects of her past work, Pinós referenced her transformation of Plaza de la Gardunya (2006), whose inspirations draw on her familiarity with the city of Barcelona, and, in particular, the rigid geometry of the plaza, especially towards the centre of the space.