2016 INTBAU World Congress Excellence Award Winners Announced

Written by Sabrina Santos
Published on November 05, 2016

The winners of the 2016 INTBAU World Congress Excellence Awards have recently been announced. Categories for this year’s competition were Community Engagement, New Building, Urban Design, and Emerging Talent. The awards were given during the INTBAU World Congress 2016, a biennial forum that brings together international participants to debate the most pressing global issues facing building, architecture, and urbanism.

"I join my jurors in applauding the considerable depth and breadth of this year's award submissions," said Anne Fairfax, President a Fairfax & Sammons Architects and jury chair of the Excellence Awards. "We found the projects to be thoughtful in leading by example in the use of traditional design but we were also pleased to see the positive social activism and environmental responsibility that characterized many of the projects, reaching deep into the values of the INTBAU mission."

The winners of the 2016 INTBAU World Congress Excellence Awards are:

New Building – The Library of Muyinga, Burundi

Part of a future inclusive school for deaf children, the building process is based on thorough fieldwork of local materials, techniques and building typologies of the surroundings, and realized through community participation.

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Community Engagement – The Mount Pleasant Association

Their ‘alternative’ community-led proposal for an old sorting office has successfully submitted Britain’s largest ever Community Right to Build Order. Receiving huge support from the local community, the urban design consists of characterful mansion blocks and is mixed use and human scale.

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Urban Design – The Notre Dame Plan of Chicago 2109

The Notre Dame Plan of Chicago 2109 contends that the broad traditions of humanist architecture and urbanism possess ample resources to solve many of the contemporary city’s most demanding practical and aesthetic problems. Chicago 2109 envisions a legible and humane metropolitan Chicago resulting from a holistic consideration of land stewardship, regional transportation, water conservation, waste water treatment, tax and zoning law, walkable neighbourhood design, durable construction, historic preservation, climate adaptation, and the symbolic content of urban form.

Emerging Talent – Ubaldo Occhinegro

Ubaldo’s virtuosic research and drawing project catalogues the typology and construction of military and residential castles built in Southern Italy by Emperor Frederick II Hoenstaufen of Swabia between 1220 and 1250. These castles represent a unique fusion of architectural styles. With their future looking uncertain due to neglect and lack of conservation, Ubaldo’s project provides both a useful record and drawn reconstruction, as well as being a work of great artistic merit.

These winners, along with honorable mentions, will be honored at an Excellence Award Ceremony on 15 November at the Royal Society of Arts in London.

News and project descriptions via INTBAU.