The Media Architecture Biennale Awards recognize the world’s best projects at the intersection of architecture, urban design and planning, media and interaction design, and urban media art.
For the 2023 edition of the Biennale in Toronto, Canada, awards were given out in five categories: Animated Media Architecture, Spatial Media Art, Future Trends and Prototypes, Equitable and Sustainable Media Architecture, Participatory Media Architecture and Infrastructures, and Transmedial Media Architecture.
Each winner received a customized award created by Toronto Metropolitan University’s Design + Technology LAB. Early sketches and maquettes were used to realize the design; CAD models were then broken into separate parts to be 3D printed, laser cut, and UV printed to achieve a unique object to celebrate this year's recipients. The award is made from nylon powder, acrylic, and garnet sand.
Animated Media Architecture
Projects in this category demonstrate creative integration and use of light sources on building façades. They add to the communicative capacity of a building and to the experience of the building, the broader site, and the surrounding public space.
Winner: M+ Facade
Project Artist: iart (facade concept development and design)
“The M+ Facade showcases a dynamic mix of screening works, offering moments of play, humour, poetry, intellectual reflection, and meditative contemplation to thousands of onlookers. Featured works, including participatory and performative screenings, engage audiences through digital platforms, while others playfully evoke the plasticity of time, presenting slow and suspenseful or frenetic and hyperactive cinematic sequences.”
Spatial Media Art
Projects produced at the intersection of architecture and media art. These projects add compelling layers of meaning to places to activate, challenge, and shape public spaces in innovative, artistic ways.
Winner: The Eye of Mexico
Project Artist: MASSIVart
“In the heart of Neuchâtel Cuadrante Polanco, The Eye of Mexico is the first piece of public art driven by artificial intelligence (AI) in Latin America, reflecting the energy of Mexico. It is located in the complex’s central square making it a benchmark for innovation, mobility and urban planning at a national and international level while boosting energy and movement to the neighbourhood.”
Future Trends and Prototypes
Projects in this category shed light on what the future of media architecture might look like. They experiment with new technologies, production methods, or ideas. Projects in this category can be both actual projects or conceptual and speculative.
Winner: ZOE
Project Artist: Noor Stenfert Kroese in collaboration with Amir Bastan
“ZOE is a temporary co-existence between the reishi mushrooms and a custom-made robotic system. Noor Stenfert Kroese and Amir Bastani explore with ZOE the possibilities of internal communication between its robotic system and reishi. Within this seeming paradox between nature and technology, an ecosystem occurs that cares for and affects each other through sensing technologies. A tactile space of data visualisations is created around ZOE in which visitors can explore ZOE’s outcome.“
Equitable and Sustainable Media Architecture
Media architecture can be used to reflect upon or address inequities and injustices related to society and/or climate. Projects in this category consider aspects of environmental and/or social justice in their ideation, design, implementation, construction, or programming.
Winner: Chatty Bench Festival Community Media Visual Projection
Project Concept & Facilitators: Kavita Gonsalves & Kofi Oduro -- Project Contributors: Agapetos Fa'aleava, Aimee Hourigan , Ashwin Nagappa, Chris Shan, Daniel Brown, Georgina B, Heather Bourke-Bashar, Katie Barrett, Jade Adlem-Marton, Sadhvi Krishnamoorthy, William Yao, Marcus Foth, Jared Donovan
“This project emphasizes the participatory creation of place-based digital stories towards community advocacy and social justice activism. It differs in that it moves away from the screen of the smartphone and superimposes these stories onto building facades as visual projections.”
Participatory Media Architecture and Infrastructures
Projects in this category aim to engage with the social and political life of the city and empower citizens to take part in collaborative city-making, especially placemaking and placekeeping. They can be digital, physical, or hybrid projects such as community platforms encouraging exchanges between citizens for the purposes of civic engagement or the management of urban infrastructures and shared resources.
Winner: <<Room of Negotiation>>
Project Artist: David Menzi
“The <<Room of Negotiation>> is a multimedia installation of different interacting representations considering the three entry points of highways in Zurich. It reveals the complexity of space and the related actors inhabiting it.”
Transmedial Media Architecture
Media architecture can engage and explore relationships with broader forms of media and technology such as social media, film, television, artificial intelligence, AR, and VR. Projects in this category explore aesthetic, technical, and social interplay amongst architecture and media (and media as architecture/architecture as media) in order to express and shape the ways we design and experience reality.
Winner: High Speed Relations
Project Artists: Tien Ling and Hsuan Fan
“Taiwan High Speed Rail spans 350 kilometers in as few as 105 minutes at 300 km/h, covering 83 meters in a second. What physical and mental experiences do these distances and numbers evoke? High Speed Relations corresponds to actual schedules of the rail service and each segment of the work is equivalent to a two-hour journey. Using real commutes as a reference framework for time and space, the project showcases the experience of speed and movement, one that is the compression of space and the extension of time.”
The awards were adjudicated by a 17-member jury from academia and industry:
MAB Awards Jury
- Nanna Verhoeff, Utrecht University
- David Bianciardi, AV&C
- Thomas Schielke, ERCO (awards chair)
- Glenda Caldwell, QUT
- Shanti Chang, StrongLED
- Sherry Dobbin, SRD Culture Ltd.
- Susa Pop, Public Art Lab
- Marília Pasculli, Verve Cultural Sao Paolo
- Gideon D’Arcangelo, Arup (awards chair)
- Vincent Hui, Toronto Metropolitan University
- Maurice Benayoun, School of Creative Media CityU Hong Kong
- Martin Tomitsch, University of Technology Sydney
- David Basulto, ArchDaily
- Ana Rita Morais, George Brown College
- Gernot Tscherteu, MAI Europe (awards chair)
- Lauren M. Cramer, University of Toronto
- Tanya Ravn Ag, University of Copenhagen (awards chair)
- Sharon Switzer, N2M2L (awards chair)
