Awards: The Latest Architecture and News

CEMEX has unveiled the international finalists for the XXIII Building Awards, which aim to recognize the best architecture and construction internationally. Spanning across three categories, the awards recognize housing, institutional/industrial and large-scale infrastructure projects that were built during 2013 and stand out for their constructive solutions, aesthetics and innovative techniques.

Both the international and national winners will be announced on November 5. Read on after the break for the international finalists and check out our coverage on the Mexican finalists for the XXIII Building Awards here.

Fast Company has released what they consider to be the 10 best designs of the year. Selected from over 1500 international submissions and 53 finalists, the MIT-born Solar System platform Mapdwell and Jonas Dahlberg’s “Memory Wound” were among the winners to receive the 2014 “Innovation by Design Award.”

More about Mapdwell and Memory Wound, after the break.

Winners have been announced for the 2014 LEAF Awards. Spanning 14 categories, including best refurbishment of the year (pictured above), all winning projects “demonstrate buildings that are setting the benchmark for the international architectural and design community.”

See which project landed Jean Nouvel top honors, after the break.

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Red Architecture’s “innovative black barn” has been awarded the ADNZ's (Architectural Designers New Zealand) 2014 Supreme National Design Award for its “subtle, economical and clever design.” Located in the beautiful rural landscape of Whatawhata in the Waikato, the project houses a private residence and garage within two “crisp barn-like forms” clad in vertical run steel and recycled bricks taken from the devastation caused by the Christchurch earthquakes.

In addition to the Supreme Award winner, eight designs from across the country were presented Resene Architectural Design Awards at the ceremony. View a glimpse of each awarded project, after the break.

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Maya Lin has been selected to receive the 21st Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, a $300,000 award presented annually to “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”

The artist and architect, who first rose to fame with her design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, was chosen from 100 nominees spanning across all fields of the arts. She was lauded for her “last memorial” - What Is Missing? - in which she has been developing for the past seven years in hopes to raise awareness about the degradation of our planet and rapid extinction of the world’s animals and plants.

Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California has won Grand Prize in the NASA Tech Briefs magazine’s “Create the Future” contest for his entry, "Robotic Building Construction by Contour Crafting.” The revolutionary construction method was awarded for being a “major innovation” that could potentially 3D print entire neighborhoods in half the time and at 30 percent less cost than traditional building methods.

Though some have visions of using Contour Crafting (CC) to sculpt the moon's first settlements, Khoshnevis primary desire is combat the world's housing shortage by using the automated construction method to rapidly deploy housing in impoverished and disaster areas.

More information and an interview with Khoshnevis on CNN, after the break. 

Hufton + Crow have been named “Architectural Photographer of the Year 2014” by Arcaid Images. The news was announced in Singapore at the World Architecture Festival after the duo’s interior image of Zaha Hadid’s Heydar Aliyev Centre staircase received the highest score from the judges. Hufton + Crow also received runner-up in the award's exterior category with another image from the Heydar Aliyev Centre. You can check it out, after the break.

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Teams from Mexico and Colombia have received top honors in the 2014 regional Holcim Awards for Latin America, an award which recognizes the most innovative and advanced sustainable construction designs. Among the top three winners is a Colombian water reservoir turned public park and low-impact timber rainforest center in Costa Rica.

The 12 recognized projects will share over $300,000 in prize money, with the top three projects overall going on to be considered for the global Holcim Awards, to be selected in 2015.

The full list of Latin American winners, after the break…

Joyce Wang Studio’s MOTT32 bar and restaurant in Hong Kong has been named the best interior space of 2014. The news was announced today in Singapore at the INSIDE World Festival of Interiors, alongside the World Architecture Festival’s Building of the Year announcement.

MOTT32, which initially took first in it’s category, was selected as the world’s best interior from 60 nominations and a shortlist of nine. The project was lauded for it's "rich texture", "theatrical environment" and "sophisticated" detail.

More about the “world’s best interior,” after the break. 

CRAB studio’s Abedian School of Architecture and Clive Wilkinson’s “endless” office table are two of four INSIDE Awards winners announced on day two of the World Festival of Interiors in Singapore. The projects join a complete list of nine category winners, all of which will be considered for the “World Interior of the Year” title.

See what was considered the best creative re-use project, civic center, education and office building after the break.

This Brazilian bookstore in São Paulo was name the best Retail Interior of 2014 as part of the first round of awards announced at the INSIDE World Festival of Interiors at the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore. Winners have been revealed across five diverse categories, with an addition four category winners to be announced tomorrow evening.

See what INSIDE deemed to be the best Bar & Restaurant, Hotel, and Residence of 2014 after the break.

ArchDaily is continuing our partnership with The Architectural Review, bringing you short introductions to the themes of the magazine’s monthly editions. In this post, we take a look at AR’s August 2014 issue, which examines the tension between the often idealised world of the architecture media and the messy complexity of real-world buildings. Here, AR Editor Catherine Slessor meditates on "the uneasy relationship between reductivist beauty contests and architecture’s nuanced narratives and complexities."

The recent announcement of the RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist has stoked up the usual feverish debate about what constitutes ‘good’ architecture and what should or shouldn’t win. But an awards scheme that can pit the Shard against the Everyman Theatre, thus perilously straddling an engorged spectrum of style, scale, client, context, user and urban contribution, is a fundamentally impossible proposition when you get down to it. One former editor of The Architects’ Journal despairingly remarked that judging the Stirling was like trying to compare a cookery book with a slim volume of poetry. Apart from both being printed on paper, they have nothing else in common. So do you plump for cookery or poetry?

On September 30, Mohsen Mostafavi will present David Adjaye with the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal, Harvard University’s highest honor in the field of African and African American studies, at the Hutchins Center Honors. Since 2000, the Du Bois Medal has been awarded to individuals from across the globe in recognition of their contributions to African and African-American history and culture. Adjaye is one of nine luminaries receiving this year’s award, including Oprah Winfrey and the late Maya Angelou. More information about the ceremony can be found here.

The 2014 Restaurant & Bar Design Award winners have been announced! The award, now in its sixth cycle, is one of the most prestigious in hospitality. Projects from the UK to China and Australia have all been recognized as being some of the world's best designed restaurant and bars. See who was selected from 3000 international submissions, after the break.

Álvaro Siza has won top honors in the “2014 Fritz Höger Awards for Excellence in Brick Architecture.” The awards, now in their third edition, highlight projects that harness the creative potential of brick. Projects from New Delhi, Barcelona and Frankfurt have all been awarded gold and silver prizes.

View all the winners, after the break.

Jury chairman Winy Maas has announced three projects by Arup, Studio Tamassociati and Elemental as winners of the 2014 Zumtobel Group Awards. With a goal to promote innovations for sustainability and humanity in the built environment, the awards represent three categories: Applied Innovations, Buildings and Urban Developments & Initiatives. This year’s winners were selected from 15 nominees, shortlisted from a competitive pool of 356 submissions.

The winning projects are marked by their innovative and ground-breaking character: “The voting to find the number one project was very close in all three categories, because in each case we were able to choose from among a large number of heterogeneous projects of high quality," Described Maas. "One key criterion for the jury this year was the innovation factor, both in a technical sense and with a view to planning and participation processes as well as ecological and social challenges.”

See the winning projects, after the break.

Shelia Kennedy has been awarded the 2014 Berkeley-Rupp Prize, a $100,000 prize presented biannually to a “distinguished practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution to promoting the advancement of women in the field of architecture, and whose work emphasizes a commitment to sustainability and the community.” Kennedy is a principal of Boston’s KVA Matx and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first-ever female Professor of the Practice of Architecture who is internationally renowned for her explorations of material innovation in the fields of architecture and urbanism.

Richard Rogers has been honored with the Coutts Lifetime Achievement Medal for his “significant and fundamental contributions to the design industry,” an announcement made as part of the London Design Festival in Rogers’ newly completed Leadenhall Building.

“He has played a leading role in designing buildings that made us think again about how we use them and how they function,” stated London Design Festival director Ben Evans. :His eminence is global, and he is part of a golden era of leading British architects who not only reshaped our city but also reshaped the world to some capacity.”