Project Updates

This Holcim Awards prize-winner is fulfilling a double mission: rebuilding infrastructure following a powerful volcanic eruption and strengthening ties within a village community affected by the destruction.

This project by Espacio Colectivo Arquitectos in Colombia offers a new residential and agrarian model for farmers living at high altitude in the mountains near Bogota. The combined residence and greenhouse proposes an affordable and modular housing solution that enhances farming conditions, reducing the economic pressure to migrate to urban centres.

The extensive Emerald Necklace park system is one of Boston’s distinctive urban amenities. Highway expansion beginning in the 1960s severed the system at various points. Today, a broad-based project aims to repair one of the most important and heavily affected sections of parkland.

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 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.

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.”

Dirk Hebel began the inaugural seminar with a brief account of his personal journey into the creation of the Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie (KIT). Dealing with innovations in the construction sector to the promotion of circular metabolisms, detoxification and durability, Hebel’s seminar introduced some of KIT’s most successful research in the search of new materials that promote fundamentally sustainable building practices.

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.

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.

“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.