A week ago, we announced the 15 finalist projects of the 2022 Building of the Year award —the prize for the best architecture in Spanish. Our jury of experts—you, our readers—made an initial selection of 15 from nearly 1,000 architectural works built in Latin America and Spain to proceed with the final vote for 3 projects that represent the best of the architecture that inspires, defines, and shapes us.
Today is the day to announce the winners of ODA2022!
We are pleased to present three projects located in Colombia, Cuba, and Chile that demonstrate the relevance of thinking of architecture as a solution to specific and local needs in order to improve the quality of life, at any scale or program.
The 2022 Building of the Year Award is presented to you by Dornbracht, renowned for its leading designs in architecture, which can be found internationally in bathrooms and kitchens. See the selected projects below.
Third place
INES Innovation Center / Pezo von Ellrichshausen
Description text provided by the project team. We are told: when resources are scarce, intensity compensates for performance (since there seems to be a deep gap between ingenuity and intelligence). We knew well that any project is a reaction to its circumstances.
This is a seemingly simple, stable, and regular building that contains an exaggerated and unexpected interior. This is the world of innovation; a continuous, fluid, and open space that conceptually and perceptually translates the creative process of academic practices, the sequential development of formal research, or the reversible and multifaceted dimension of informal knowledge.
Second place
Tower House / Albor Arquitectos
Description text provided by the project team. An unstable socioeconomic reality lies at the core of the Tower House project. The prospect of an uncertain future shaped the program, which attempts to respond by erecting a watchtower from which to navigate future challenges. Tower House is located at the top of a small hill in a mostly flat coastal city, which provides unexpected and exceptional views.
The lot, characterized by an existing prefabricated house with a backyard, is distinguished by an atypical front-to-back ratio within the city's compact grid and the benefit of a ground coverage ratio of less than 50%. On this plot, the project had to resolve an open program that required a structure capable of functionally reinventing itself in relation to the prevailing "situation"—from precarity to livelihood, from daily routine to a full life.
First place
CCO Center / El Equipo Mazzanti
Description text provided by the project team. In recent years, a series of highways has been developed in Colombia to unify a country characterized by mountainous and difficult-to-access geography. This hard infrastructure connects major ports and cities, passing through highly impoverished regions largely underserved by the state; the communities along these highways receive little more than connectivity.
For this reason, and as an initiative of El Equipo Mazzanti and the Odinsa company, a new type of highway operations and communications infrastructure was proposed to the Colombian government. These CCO centers usually only served as buildings tied to highway operations, without any relationship to nearby communities. The proposal expanded the use of these CCO control and communications buildings by integrating training classrooms, a regional product distribution center, a marketplace for local goods, an open-air cinema, and sports fields. This shifts CCOs from being structures designed solely for efficiency to becoming spaces for community-building and improving the quality of life for local farmers.
This article was written by Fabian Dejtiar. The translation is powered by AI.
