The Gabriel García Márquez Library from Barcelona and a campus pavilion of the Technical University of Braunschweig (Germany) are the two winning projects of the European Union Contemporary Architecture Prize-Mies van der Rohe Awards 2024as announced this Thursday in Brussels.
The winner of the 2024 Architecture Prize is the Campus Pavilion of the Technical University of Braunschweig, made by the architects Gustav Düsing and Max Hackeboth with studies in Berlin.
This building has been awarded for its “ability to challenge limitations and preconceptions about sustainabilitycreating a welcoming and playful environment for study, collaboration and community gathering through a relentless and carefully detailed structure.”
According to the jury, “more than a building, it could be understood as a versatile system that fuses technological advances with a flexible and reusable principle“.
The authors, Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke, who founded their studios in 2015 and won the competition to build this pavilion in 2015, have become the youngest winners of the EUmies Awards.
Catalan library
The winner of Emerging Architecture Award 2024 It is the Gabriel García Márquez Library of Barcelona, municipally owned, designed by SUMA Arquitectura, a studio founded by Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano in Madrid.
The García Márquez Library acts at the city level, contributing to the neighborhood transformationopening as a new exterior and interior public space.
For the jury, its wooden structure develops as “a rich sequence of monumental and domestic spaces that welcome neighbors and citizensproviding them with comfortable environments for learning, teamwork and community engagement.”
Change mentalities
The two award-winning projects have been chosen from an initial group of 362 nominated works to the EUmies Awards 2024, from which the jury selected five finalist works.
The five finalists for The Hage Architecture Prize were completed by mystical garden on the outskirts of Lund (Sweden), by Pryce & Myers; he Reggio School in Madrid, by Andrés Jaque; the Plato’s works in Ostrava, by KWK Promes; and the convent of San Francisco in Santa Lucía de Tallano (Corsica, France); while the project square and the tourist office of Piódão de Branco del Rio (Portugal) was the other finalist for the emerging award.
The EUmies Awards 2024 jury highlights the relevance of architecture that explores the potential of change mentalities and policiesas well as the importance of encourage inclusion.
The finalist and winning works form, according to the jury, an inseparable whole to better understand the paths that contemporary architecture takes “to confront sustainabilitysocial equity, technological advances, health and well-being, cultural preservation, resilience and adaptation, economic viability and globalization within an ethical practice, both ideologically and pragmatically.
The awards ceremony will take place on may 14 next in the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion and in the Victoria Eugenia Palace of the Fira de Barcelona, at the beginning of the Barcelona Architecture Weeks.
