GLOBAL AWARD FOR SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE™ 2016 CITÉ DE L’ARCHITECTURE & DU PATRIMOINE Palais de Chaillot - 1 place du Trocadéro Paris 16e - métro Trocadéro or Iéna CONTACTS CITÉ DE L’ARCHITECTURE & DU PATRIMOINE Cultural Development Marie-Hélène Contal, director [email protected] Press Contacts CITÉ Fabien Tison Le Roux 0033 1 58 51 52 85 0033 6 23 76 59 80 [email protected] Caroline Loizel 0033 1 58 51 52 82 0033 6 86 75 11 29 [email protected] LOCUS Jana Revedin, Prof arch PhD, Founding President 38 rue Copernic 75116 Paris 0033 1 40 67 06 40 [email protected] www.locus-foundation.org www.citechaillot.fr 2 summary 10 years of Global Award for Sustainable Architecture by Marie-Hélène Contal P.4 5 Award-Winning Architects 2016 P.8 CASE STUDIO, Patama Roonrakwit, P.8 Bangkok, Thaïlande GION ANTONI CAMINADA, P.14 Vrin, Switzerland KENGO KUMA, P.20 Tokyo, Japan PATRICE DOAT, P.28 Grenoble, France EAST COAST ARCHITECTS, P.34 Derek Van Heerden & Steve Kinsler, Durban, South Africa Bibliography & Publications P.40 Timetable 2016-2017 P.41 Founder P.42 LOCUS Foundation P.42 Partners Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine Patrons P.43 Scientific Committee P.44 Cover : Kengo Kuma, Memu Meadows, experimental house, Hokkaido, 2011 © Kengo Kuma & Associates 3 10 years of Global Award for Sustainable Architecture by Marie-Hélène Contal The Global Award for Sustainable Architecture was created in 2006 by the LOCUS Foundation, together with its cultural partner the Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine, as a means of supporting the global debate on architecture and the city in the age of the major transitions. Each year it honours five architects who share a belief in more sustainable development and who have pioneered innovative and holistic approaches in their own communities, in western and emerging countries, in developed cities and precarious districts, in megalopolises and in the countryside. The idea of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture is to bring these highly relevant architects together and to encourage them to share their know-how and experience. Since its creation in 2006, it has been awarded to 50 architects, from the major early movers to the young rebels of the global scene. Hence, this year, the Global Award is saw the emergence of new green norms celebrating its first decade. And it is without stepping back to consider the customary to use such a birthday as an reasons behind them. opportunity to feel proud and look back And it attracted – and continues to on the progress made so far. attract – the scepticism of historians When it was launched in 2006, the and theoreticians who are unwilling to Global Award aroused little interest in consider the emergence of ecological professional and academic circles. Its ideas as comparable to the rise of basic hypothesis – that architecture Modernism, the radical break which still and architects are centrally affected by underpins both architectural education 1. Bruno Latour, Discussion “Au tournant de l’expérience”, Cité de l’architecture ecological, energetic, urban and migratory and most architectural institutions. & du patrimoine, Paris, 12th June 2016. transition - aroused reactions ranging 2. uia Session “Architecture, the climate Yet whether one smiles, is annoyed by or of the future,” at the opening of cop21, from a knowing smile and a degree simply undervalues an architectural scene Paris, Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine, 30th November 2015. of hostility to theoretical or historical that has been emerging for 30 years, one’s 3. Recommandation regarding rejection. reason is basically the same. Nobody the historic urban landscape, unesco, 7th Mai 2012. It earned knowing smiles from those who disagrees that we are experiencing an saw these transitions as factors which ecological crisis, an energy revolution would, at most, modify a few parameters and massive urbanisation... the only of a discipline which, as a creative act, is disagreement is about their scale. able to filter and control or even hide from For some, these transitions are crises such contingencies. of serious but manageable proportions. It annoyed Western architects who, They will find solutionsby using science already weary of overregulation, simply and technology to master nature. 4 And these solutions will challenge Transforming its message, the uia called This objective has often led to the neither the trajectory nor the definition upon architects to take a leading role in recognition of virtual unknowns. Who of progress which, since the Modernists, the global political debate on the great knew Wang Shu when he received has depended upon this ability to transitions2. One should also recall the Global Award in 2007 when the master nature; a theoretical position that Unesco, with its Recommandation Hangzhou Campus for which he was renewed in the augmented Modernism regarding the urban historic landscape3, awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2012 of the Singulitaristes. had shifted the debate about was no more than a huge building For others, however, events such as the approaches to urban heritage towards site cluttered by piles of old bricks oil crisis of 1974 and the systemic crisis of the consideration of urban landscape in and tiles brought from downtown 2008 are not simple jolts to the smooth all the complexity of its interactions and where ancient quarters were being course of progress but historical as an evolving organism. demolished ? Who knew Alejandro caesuras. Caesuras which separate a Finally, we should mention the Aravena in 2008 ? The Pritzker Prize century in which rapidly accelerating construction industry and some of that he received this year is another development was based on the its companies. It is never easy to celebration of change. But it has also overexploitation of resources from a 21st express such things in an architectural provoked a lively polemic which we century which should finally put an end milieu which is always quick to should address here, because it also to a moribund Modernism “which lacks suspect mercantilism, but one must partly concerns the agenda of the the means to understand not a crisis but acknowledge the evidence: In Europe Global Award. an ecological mutation”1 and readdress and elsewhere it is these players The co-founder of Elemental is forms of human settlement. who made the move towards eco- accused of reintegrating favelas The Global Award overcame these construction, both in the laboratory with the help of bad architecture. initial objections which, in any and on site. And they sometimes It is said that, over time, the half- case, remained relatively muted did this together with architects, as in finished houses that he hands over as the emergence of an ecological the case of Vorarlberg where a timber- to their inhabitants become – with architecture did little to affect the based eco-industry developed over the their additions and open, street-level onward march of international course of 30 years thanks to a cluster in shops – more working-class districts architecture. It was also significant that which architects play a major role. than social housing. the cause in question - supporting an This was the work facing us in 2007 This polemic is useful because it architecture which redefined itself in and it was through doing such work polarises the debate. It enables us terms of its relationship with the major that players so varied in size and to distinguish between a modernist transitions - already had allies. nature as UN Habitat, the Global scene faithful to its instruments of The first that we should mention is Award, the uia and Unesco - which progress – here, the functional social UN Habitat. Created in 1978 with the became a patron of the Global Award dwelling – and a contemporary scene aim of improving the habitat of the in 2011 – got to know each other. that finds these too slow, costly and regulated for densely populated most precarious populations, the un’s Since then the Global Award can milieux (precarious cities), whose form human settlement programme was be content that it became… what it of development is no longer that of originally intended as a mechanism for wanted to become. Less a symbol the industrial city. These architects exporting the western urban model. of acceptance than a springboard explore approaches to change which However, UN Habitat underwent a for emerging approaches. Less an are based not on the project but – as paradigm change after the Habitat II academy than a place of research in the case of Elemental – on the Summit in Istanbul in 1996, integrating and experimentation – and resistance. process. sustainable development as a factor The dialogue that it facilitates of social progress and also - through between the architects of the North The Moderns regarded popular contact with emerging countries and and the South leads to other visions: habitat as informal. Elemental’s their precarious cities - abandoning the of innovation, of the rejection of such habitat is hardly any less informal notion of the tabula rasa. In registering 20th century labels as urban and – and with good reason. It works the fait accompli of these cities and rural. The Global Award has become a by simply structuring an existing their spirit of self-development, UN monitor of the laboratories overseen dynamic based on people’s right to Habitat became a catalyst for the by architects who share and – as we build. By reinforcing this process it innovations of the South. will see later - formulate advanced brings something better, rather than A similar about-turn was undertaken by theories. the radical perfection for which the the International Union of Architects Moderns required a tabula rasa. after its own summit in Istanbul in 2005. 5 But let us return to the Global Award, decision-making.