The Pavilion on the campus of the Technical University of Brunswick, the work of Berlin architects Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke, has won the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture Mies van der Rohe, in its 2024 edition. It is a pavilion detachable and reusable study designed to promote social and knowledge exchange between students and teachers in a welcoming and playful environment. The Mies van der Rohe award for emerging architecture has gone to the García Márquez Library in Barcelona, a project by Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano, members of the Madrid studio SUMA Arquitectura, which last year already won the FAD Architecture award and was chosen in Rotterdam as the best library in the world by the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions.
"All the awards we have received are special, but the EUmies is, without a doubt, one of the most important. It is the crowning of a long history of recognition, which follows years of effort and, it must be said, difficulties, stress and suffering," point out the SUMA architects, for whom the emerging nature of the award, "more than our supposed youth (architecture is a long career), also recognizes the contribution to disciplinary progress, understanding that the library faces contemporary architectural challenges that will shape part of the debate in the coming years.
For their part, Düsing and Hacke, who founded their studio in 2015 and are the youngest winners of the EUmies Awards, have expressed their surprise, while highlighting that "being a fairly small building with a limited budget, the Study Pavilion seems to resonate very well with our times." Conceived to respond to the evolution of the academic landscape in a post-pandemic world, the pavilion is a completely removable hybrid construction of steel and wood that creates community between students of all disciplines present on campus.
"We deeply appreciate the recognition of local projects that improve social structures and communities, since we truly believe in the transformative capacity of architecture," say the architects, who trust that their project "inspires other universities to be more aware of its role within the city by offering high-quality, open and free spaces, accessible to everyone. Our building is very human-centered, encouraging direct communication between people and allowing random encounters and student culture. prototype of a public building of the 21st century".
The two winners were chosen from a list of 362 nominated works. Along with the Pavilion on the campus of the Technical University of Brunswick, four other buildings, including the Reggio School, built in Encinar de los Reyes by Andrés Jaque, which shared ex aequo the last FAD with the García Márquez Library; the renovation of the Convent of Saint-François in Sainte-Lucie de Tallano, by Amelia Tavella Architectes; Plato Contemporary Art Gallery in Ostrava (Czech Republic), by KWK Promes; and Hage in Lund (Sweden), by Brendeland
For the jury, both the winning and finalist works form an "inseparable whole to better understand the paths that contemporary architecture takes to address sustainability, social equity, technological advances, health and well-being, cultural preservation, resilience and adaptation, economic viability and globalization within an ethical and both ideological and pragmatic practice.
The awarding ceremony of the Mies van der Rohe awards will be held in the Barcelona pavilion and in the Palau Victòria Eugènia at the start of the Weeks of Architecture.
