The Obel Award is an international prize for architectural achievement presented annually by the Henrik Frode Obel Foundation. Each year, the jury selects a specific theme and grants an award to a promising solution. For the 2024 edition, the prize that honors architectural contributions that positively impact both people and the planet will be focused on “Architecture With”.
Previous emphasis included Adaptations, Emissions, Cities, Mending, and Well-being. In 2023, the fifth cycle recognized ‘Living Breakwaters’ in New York, a green infrastructure project off the shore of Staten Island, by SCAPE Landscape Architecture and its founder Kate Orff. In 2022, the Obel was awarded to Seratech, a carbon-neutral concrete solution, in 2021, the concept of the 15-minute city received the prize for its value in creating sustainable and people-centric urban environments, and in 2020, Studio Anna Heringer was acknowledged for Anandaloy, in Bangladesh, an unconventional, multifunctional building that hosts a therapy center for people with disabilities on the ground floor and a textile studio on the top floor producing fair fashion and art. Finally, in its first edition, fixated on well-being, the Obel Award was granted to the Art Biotop Water Garden project in Tochigi, Japan, by Junya Ishigami & Associates.
The rapidly shifting climates are generating challenges for all demographics and species, and to mitigate these problems, architects and designers need to develop strategies to handle the complexities involved in creating innovative, safe, and adaptable environments that enable diverse communities to flourish.
According to the official brief, “Architecture With”, "looks at navigating the difference between participatory and co-creation as well as bringing in other bodies of knowledge to the center of the design process", "questions the role of the architect and the profession as a whole, through re-envisaging technique and exploring radical new ways of sharing and giving agency to all stakeholders", and "opens the discourse to take practicing architecture beyond where it is today. Looking to address collective design and process with other disciplines and be co-creative in a non-hierarchical way. What is the honest way of working with, where the architect takes on the role of translator."
Architecture is by nature plural. It is important not to underestimate the complexity nor the collective intelligence of a community. The symbiosis appears when each party can listen to the other, when respectfulness and social intelligence is employed throughout the project. -- Kjetil Trædal Thorsen, Snøhetta Co-founder, OBEL AWARD Jury Chair.
The 2024 OBEL AWARD jury consists of:
- Kjetil Trædal Thorsen Chair (co-founder, Snöhetta, Norway)
- Nathalie de Vries (founding partner MVRDV, Rotterdam, The Netherlands)
- Louis Becker (design principal and partner, Henning Larsen, Denmark)
- Dr Wilhelm Vossenkuhl (professor emeritus of philosophy, Germany)
- XU Tiantian (founding principal, DnA, Beijing, China)
- Aric Chen (general and artistic director of the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, The Netherlands)
- Sumayya Vally (founder and principal at Counterspace in Johannesburg and London, South Africa and the United Kingdom)
