Guided tour: Europe’s Best Buildings. European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. Mies van der Rohe Awards 2024

Guided tour: Europe’s Best Buildings. European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. Mies van der Rohe Awards 2024

Tue 03.12., 17.30h, Architekturzentrum Wien

The EUMies Awards Prize, endowed with 90,000 euros in prize money (60,000 Main Award / 30,000 Emerging Architecture Award), is the most important European architecture prize. The accompanying exhibition is a seismograph for architectural developments in Europe and this year focuses on circular construction, existing buildings, and public open spaces.

Every two years, the Europe’s Best Buildings exhibition highlights outstanding architectural projects from Europe and has become a veritable crowd puller. The award-winning projects stand for change in the current social, ecological, and economic context and serve as a guide for the development of contemporary architecture. In 2024, the main award will once again go to an educational building: The Study Pavilion on the Technical University of Braunschweig campus by Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke offers a flexible and innovative learning environment that promotes social and professional exchange. The sleek steel-wood hybrid construction is completely demountable. Besides the possibility of densifying the building with additional platforms, it can also be rebuilt in a different form or at a different location. The winner of the "Emerging Architecture 2024" prize is the Gabriel García Márquez Library in Barcelona by SUMA Arquitectura (Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano). The sculptural structure enlivens a long-disadvantaged working-class district and at the same time creates an open urban lounge that was immediately accepted by visitors and residents alike.

Among the finalists: the revitalisation of the Saint-François Convent in Corsica by Amelia Tavella Architects; the conversion of a dilapidated slaughterhouse in Ostrava, Czech Republic, into the PLATO City Gallery of Contemporary Art by KWK Promes, in which the contaminated space around the building was also transformed into a biodiverse art park; the new school building for the Colegio Reggio in Madrid by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, which resembles an assemblage of diverse climatic zones, ecosystems, and architectural traditions that create a learning environment for collective and self-determined learning; and the Hage public space and garden in Lund, Sweden, which is the first project in a larger new development area and will evolve from an object in the landscape to a void in the urban fabric. The finalist for the Emerging Architecture Prize is the renovation of the tourism information office and redesign of the surrounding square in Piódão, Portugal, by Branco del Rio.

Out of the 362 nominated projects from 38 countries, a total of 40 projects were selected for the exhibition by the prominent jury chaired by the French architect Frédéric Druot, including two projects from Austria: the Neubaugasse Townhouse in Vienna by PSLA Architekten and IKEA Wien Westbahnhof by querkraft architekten.

An exhibition by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona and the European Union.