The theme of the 2022 edition of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture was: “Territory: threat or opportunity?”
The current global debate examines the concept of territory and its relationship with architecture. As the climate crisis and issues of ecology become increasingly concrete, the territory becomes a vital but threatened “background” of our inhabited environment, rather than a “simple inscribed surface.”
Dorte Mandrup – Photo © Volker Renner
Ilulissat Icefjord Centre – Photo © Adam Mork
The term territory is ambiguous. It is used by agronomists, ethologists, historians, urbanists, geographers… and it also unites all the geographies: physical, human, economic. Can it be constructed without destructing it? How should we see our new relationship with the territory?
These challenges expand the mission of architecture: today, more than ever before, architects share the responsibility for taking care of the planet; and they can also propose and provide a model for a new way of representing the world.
Creativity Co-housing, Auroville – Photo © Javier Callejas
Anupama Kundoo – Photo © Andreas Deffner
The winners of the prestigious prize are five world-renowned architects who share the characteristic of having experimented with innovative and holistic approaches to their communities, in western and developing countries, in precarious cities and districts, megacities and countrysides.
Martin Rauch
Prototype for a Room for Birth and Senses
The five winners are: Anupama Kundoo (Auroville, India – Berlin, Germany); Dorte Mandrup (Copenhagen, Denmark); Martin Rauch (Schlins, Vorarlberg, Austria); Gilles Clément (Crozant, France) and Okan Bal & Ömer Selçuk Baz, of the studio Yalin Architectural Design (Istanbul, Turkey).
Jardin du Tiers-Paysage
Gilles Clément – Photo © Eric Legret
Created in 2006 by the architect and researcher Jana Revedin in collaboration with the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine (Paris) and the member institutions of its board of advisors, over the years the prize has demonstrated its independence, gathering the winners (75 with those of the 2022 edition) into a community of designers at the avant-garde of research and experimentation in the field of architecture, urbanism and social and academic responsibility, focusing on an ethic of sustainability.
Ömer Selçuk Baz (Yalin Architectural Design)
Zonduldak Caves Visitor Center – Photo © E. Karakaya
Recognized by UNESCO in 2010, the initiative relies on a jury of experts composed of Jana Revedin, president and founder of the award (Venice), Marie-Hélène Contal (Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine, Paris), Deniz İncedayı (Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul), Spela Hudnik (International Architecture Biennale of Ljubljana) and Jacopo Galli (IUAV University of Venice), along with honorary members, two previous winners, Takaharu Tezuka and Francis Kéré.
Each year the projects, ideas and practices of the winners are illustrated in a book, Sustainable Design: Vers une nouvelle éthique pour l’architecture et la ville (“towards a new ethic for architecture and the city”), coordinated and written by Marie-Hélène Contal and Jana Revedin, and co-published by Gallimard Editions Alternatives and Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine. The latest volume, no. 9, is on the winners of the Global Awards in 2021.
