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

Common, humane values

Each jury has been different, but all have held some underlying criteria and values in common. Juries have to a great degree eschewed formalism and chosen work that enhances human life and that of the planet. Without being pompous about it. Jurors have accepted that architecture and design are moral issues that concern us all, and not primarily means for gratifying the egos of designers and their clients. Juries have broadly accepted the environmental imperative, that architecture and design can and must have a major part to play in enabling humanity to live in greater harmony with the planet. Another set of values embraced by successive juries has been tectonic integrity and materiality. A further criterion has been the quality of response to context and the genius loci. While successive juries have had a good deal in common, so have many entries. While we have had some large buildings in the past, for instance the Nuuk cultural centre in Greenland (AR December 1999), the Finnish Embassy in Berlin (AR December 2000), and a major headquarters block in the same city, many of the entries have been quite small, for small commissions are what architects starting out on their own usually begin with. This year's award winners included the tiny house by Atelier Tekuto in Tokyo (p50), which won its place for its extraordinary constructional ingenuity and sheer compression. Daniel Bonilla's little chapel in a clearing in the Columbian forest (p42) achieved its award for the ingenuity with which a small volume can generously extend itself in welcome to congregations much larger than the normal one. Other distinguished small works celebrated here include the masterly mausoleum in Murcia by Manuel Clavel Rojo (p60), the garden pavilion by eightyseven at Sant Miquel de Cruilles, Spain (p69) and the temporary Swiss exhibition gallery in Madrid by 2b Architectes (p82).

Two of the award winners were celebrated largely because of their very different responses to genius loci. At the winery near Otago, New Zealand by Architecture Workshop, the blade of the artefact enhances but contrasts with the sublime natural landscape (p46). PLOT's approach to making a youth sailing club in the dreary, flat, exhausted landscape of Amager in the Copenhagen complex was to make an entirely new and exciting artificial landscape showing admirable practical command of new geometries (p38). Two houses, Krater in the Cyclades by DECA Architecture (p66), and David Mc Dowell's transformation of a derelict farm in County Dublin (p76), show great sympathy with their completely different sites and circumstances.

Transformations

We were happy to celebrate Tezuka Architects' splendid local museum in the mountains of the Niigata Province, Japan (p78), which both explains the strange landscape, and physically engages with it. Similarly, in the Italian lake country, Marco Castelletti's bathing establishment responds to the stunning natural beauty of its site by reaching out into it (p72). Castelletti's small urban transformation at Cesano Maderno was highly commended for its imaginative and sensitive transformation of the traditional fabric (p58). Incidentally, Castelletti is one of a very few architects to be honoured twice in the same year. A contrasting instance of urban landscape transformation is seen in the delightful woven water installation made by Turenscape at Dujiangyan City in Sichuan Province, China (p98).