Winning projects 2011 in Europe

The Flussbad project is located in the center of Berlin and transforms an unused arm of the River Spree into a natural 745m “swimming pool”. The facility is the equivalent of seventeen Olympic swimming pools with an average width of 28.8m and features a 780m-long reed bed filtration system. The Flussbad will have a direct and strong impact on the quality of urban life and will make a positive ecological contribution through the remediation of the city’s waterways.

The aim of this project, initiated by the city of Oostkamp, 7km south of Brugge, is to regenerate a former Coca-Cola factory. The 4ha site has to be transformed into a new City Hall and Civic Center for the municipality with a population of 22,000 and opened in June 2012. The key idea of the project was not only to recycle the main construction and materials but also to reuse the space itself and its technical infrastructure.

The development of a new freeway that replaces the present one and its viaducts from the 1960/70s offers manifold potentials for handling the existing structures. Parco Solare Sud – Nests for European Snowbirds proposes a sensible conversion of one of the viaducts into vertical homes, 5km east of Scilla in southern Italy. The homes are intended for European retirees attracted by lifestyle factors including the climate and breathtaking scenery overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea.

The edible Eathouse is a simple response on how to link urban space to green recreation areas and how to supply food with respect to its production – both matters of the socio-cultural quality of life. The Eathouse is an inexpensive modular system of plastic crates and scaffolding. It creates the potential for growing a greater volume of “urban food” in a particularly confined space.

The Wasteless Free-Form Formwork construction technology combines existing processes and materials in a new way to fabricate non-repetitive free-form cast-on-site concrete structures using re-usable and digitally-fabricated wax formwork. The approach enables highly accurate, complex and free-form geometries of contemporary architectural production to be fabricated at lower cost.

The design scheme addresses the future of the city of Hamburg as a high-performing and attractive 21st century metropolis. The brief for the Smart Material House required proposals for innovative building techniques and materials for a public housing project in a less developed neighborhood. The units range in size between 90 and 225 square meters, and incorporate fast-growth fir decking slabs with pre-fabricated infra-lightweight concrete walls.

The new headquarters of SITRA, the Finnish innovation fund, is part of an inner-city building complex that augments the urban redevelopment of the former Jätkäsaari docklands in Helsinki. The aim for the entire building complex is to establish a “sustainable living” and “low-to-no carbon emission” performance through participatory planning and design methods.

Cast on Cast, efficient and sustainable fabrication process is focused upon the development of a smart but simple methodology to design and prefabricate building elements with complex geometries, which is resource efficient and considerably reduces construction waste. Complex geometries are utilized in contemporary architecture for the construction of concrete or mortar building envelopes, partition walls, horizontal and vertical shading elements and pavements.

The RE-converting project incorporates multifaceted architectural tools and concepts to generate a sustainable society based upon minimal human impact while also providing energy, employment, and welfare conditions for the people who live, work and play in the new community.

The concept proposes the design and fabrication of glowing devices that do not consume electricity through the manipulation of bioluminescent populations of microorganisms. A species of bacteria that naturally glows in the dark, Vibrio Fischeri, and a species of algae that glows when excited by movement, Pyrocystis Fusiformis, are tested to determine their suitability. The bioluminescent devices can be used for public ambient lighting, natural park illumination and billboards.