Global Holcim Awards Finalists 2015

Winners of the Global Holcim Awards Gold, Silver, and Bronze were announced on April 20, 2015. The USD 2 million Holcim Awards is the most significant international competition for sustainable design.

Liquid city: Instead of a predesigned urban tissue, a controlled growth process is proposed. The initial grid of gardens is the support of the urban, which will develop in time through small-scale gradual appropriations. The result will be a liquid city that works as a complete urban configuration in all stages of consolidation, satisfying the current societal needs, but is also able to adapt itself to any contextual change or future necessities.

The project provides public space for leisure and vitality.

Initial sketch and site plan: Relation of the site to its surrounding territory.

The SICU prototype is a compact double-story unit comprised of a prefabricated concrete lower structure and lightweight eucalyptus frames for the upper floor. After all parts have been prefabricated, the building was constructed in ten days by 35 students from three countries and now stands erect in a typical neighborhood of Addis Ababa, serving to demonstrate an alternative housing approach and to prompt further discussions between policy makers, industry and academia.

North East façades.

Atlas, strategies, processes: A landscape of ninety acres. The design of Saline Joniche’s landscapes, a project by AutonomeForme and GrupoAranea. Copyright © AutonomeForme

This zone offers learning pathways and open fields to host different events.

Kokokali is a compound word derived from the Nahuatl kokone (children) and kali (house). Kokokali, the Children’s House, achieves an emotional connection between the educational space, its community and its users.

Construction photo. (Image by Sagar Chitraka)

3D view of the proposed library: The single-story building mass spans nonchalantly across the landscape, touching the earth as lightly as possible. The building informally wraps around an internal courtyard that is also an extension of the external landscape. The placement of the building on site retains all existing trees, while its linear footprint allows optimized natural ventilation and brings in sunlight to all internal rooms; rammed earth walls provide thermal mass.

Chiang Mai Bird Sanctuary: Designed as a bird haven – allowing ground birds, water birds, and birds of prey to fly in an integrated facility that resembles their natural habitat.

Aerial view.

Hy-Fi is a new paradigm for design and manufacturing, with almost zero waste, zero embodied energy, and zero carbon emissions. It is a compostable structure that offers a new vision for society’s approach to physical objects and the built environment.

Las Vegas loses 74,000 megaliters (60,000 acre-feet) of rainfall to the shallow aquifer per year in the form of urban runoff, the result of frequent major flooding. At the same time, the city is spending precious energy pumping water uphill from Lake Mead to the newest suburbs, and from the deeper principal aquifer to offset what is lost to runoff. Downtown floods because all detention basins are located in the suburbs. We propose a system of smaller basins for the dense downtown to encourage strategic growth.

How can the mandate of large-scale protective infrastructure with meaningful community engagement be obtained? How can the requirements of a “Robert Moses” hard infrastructure combined with the local community-driven sensitivity of Jane Jacobs be manifest? BIG U contains a protective ribbon: 21 km (13 mi) of flood protection tailored to each neighborhood and the community it serves.