Emerging architecture: work celebrated in the ar+d awards this year comes from all inhabited continents and represents a very wide diversity of building types and thoughtful responses to an extraordinary range of society, topography and climate

Architectural Review, The, Dec, 2004 by Peter Davey

This is the sixth annual celebration of the ar+d awards, and a suitable moment for reviewing their history and present state. From the first, we were determined that they should celebrate talent, excellence, imagination and ingenuity so, unlike many awards, the ar+d ones were never intended to make a profit for their promoters.

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We all know the falseness of such affairs. To cash brought in by high entry fees for competitors are added profits from vertiginously vulgar 'gala dinners' that entrants are expected to spend lots of money to attend. At these sickeningly boring events, the dubious decisions of an often shadowy jury are announced with flatulent rhetoric and overchewed jokes to the accompaniment of plastic food and dishwasher wine. The torture of such evenings is deliberately prolonged because awards are divided into as many categories as possible so each can attract a sponsor to add to the event's income.

Open to all, regardless

Before anyone accuses me of hypocrisy, I am happy to admit that the ar+d awards do have sponsors. We started them in partnership with the Danish architectural design company d line, a link that ended after five years of creative collaboration. Our principal supporters this year are Buro Happold, (1) the international consulting engineers and, for the first time, German firm Grohe Water Technology. (2) They both generously make it possible for us to break even, and without them the whole operation would be impossible. We are most grateful to them.

We wanted the awards to be open to all eligible architects and designers, no matter where they come from or what their income. So there are no entry fees. Work for some of the poorest people in the world has been celebrated, as well as buildings for the prosperous (indeed, the first award of all was given to an orphanage for a really impoverished mountain community in Chhebetar, Nepal, by Hans Olav Hesseberg, and Sixten Rahlff, with Eli Synnevag, AR December 1999). We have been delighted to find a very wide global response over the years; we have had entries from a great spectrum of countries of projects as different as a house made of living trees in Ethiopia and an inflatable silver construction site wall in Tokyo, an organic bus station carved out of polystyrene foam in the Netherlands and a crematorium in India. This year, entries came from well over 50 places as far apart as Argentina and Austria, China and Chile, Singapore and Slovenia. Countries new to the awards included Mauritius, the Seychelles and Vietnam (the latter entry won a commendation, see p64). (3)

Over the years, we have modified rules and procedures. At first, for instance, we attempted to make a single overall award. It quickly became apparent that attempting to select just one winner out of such a diverse range of entries was extremely difficult, absurd even. So, in each of the last five years we have had several award winners, among whom the prize money (4) is divided equally. To the winners is always added a complement of commended, highly commended and mentioned schemes.

No straitjacket

Though we have sometimes contemplated setting up different categories within the awards scheme, for instance architecture and product design, landscape and building, public and private, we have never done so formally for several reasons. First, it is difficult to fix categories in advance for such a heterogeneous collection of work without forcing individual entries into often inappropriate pigeon holes. Second, categories can cause confusion: for instance an entry could be both a landscape and a building, or a conversion and an urban element. To decide that an entry should fit one category would be arbitrary and hinder understanding of complexity. The third reason for not having formal categories is that no jury has ever asked for them (though we have usually discussed the idea at some point in the proceedings). We have often had temporary and fluid groupings of entries during the assessment process, but they have never been formalized.

Nor have the juries ever questioned the ground rules of entry for the awards. Work submitted must be built or manufactured. It must have been designed and supervised by the people or teams submitting the entry. Entrants must be 45 years old or younger (the limit was chosen because, in many countries, it is difficult for architects and designers to make their own way before that age).

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The editors have been proud of all six of our juries. Jurors have been selected for their own internationally recognized and distinguished contributions to practice and the human-made world. Almost always, they have been rather older than 45, but on one or two occasions, they have been able to enter themselves (though of course, they didn't). Usually, people who have rarely, if ever, met each other before have got on remarkably well. Members have complemented each other and there have been very few moments when violent scenes threatened to break out. This year's jury members were Gert Wingardh (Gothenburg), Mario Cucinella (Bologna, former winner of an ar+d commendation in 2003), Kevin Daly (Daly Genik, Los Angeles) and Ryue Nishizawa (Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA, Tokyo); as editor of the AR, I (a non-practising architect) was chairman and have written the summary notes on each scheme shown here.