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The Norman Foster Foundation is awarding 10 scholarships for students to participate in the first edition of the Re-materializing Housing Workshop 2020, to be held at the Norman Foster Foundation Headquarters in Madrid, Spain. 

The workshop is supported by the LafargeHolcim Foundation and will take place from March 23-27, 2020.

Re-materializing Housing Workshop 2020 debates how knowledge learnt from vernacular architecture techniques can best be combined with the developments of new technologies to design affordable housing solutions.

Construction of the LafargeHolcim Awards winning net-zero energy greenhouse at Wellesley College, USA is now complete. Sustainable design is at the very core of the structure, form, and system – meeting sustainability metrics as a matter of course and then goes much further to achieve a virtuosity of integration. The Global Flora conservatory at the Margaret C Ferguson Greenhouses will open to the general public when renovation of the Science Center is completed in two years. More than 1,000 varieties of plants are housed in the bio-friendly greenhouse – and are showing signs of handling the transition well.

Prof Dr Marc Angélil, Head of the Academic Committee of the LafargeHolcim Foundation delivered a keynote address at the Urban Quality: Density, Diversity, and Sustainability conference in Nanjing, China. The lecture “Terra: Project Earth” examined the effects of urbanization at the global scale. Earth itself can be conceptualized as an unsustainable city – highlighting the urgent need for action.

“The LafargeHolcim Awards are an opportunity to celebrate new ideas and innovations, and to establish a global dialogue with our colleagues,” enthuses Enrique Norten, architect, founder of TEN Arquitectos and member of the Board of the LafargeHolcim Foundation. However, before the LafargeHolcim Awards prizes are conferred, the submissions must be meticulously analyzed and assessed. To facilitate this lengthy process, each applicant must fulfil expectations with regard to several criteria of evaluation set out by the LafargeHolcim Foundation.

It was a full house at the Bandung Creative City Forum in the city’s historic quarter on October 31. Around 80 eager participants including architecture students and representatives of prominent architectural practices in Bandung gathered to examine the future of the built environment and of sustainability. Held to coincide with the Bandung Design Biennale, the key message was that creativity and ecologically integrated design were central elements in designing for sustainability. The event featured a presentation by Nirmal Kishnani of his latest research on how to create robust socio-ecological systems and a panel discussion on the benefits of participating in design competitions including the LafargeHolcim Awards. Organized by local architects Florian Heinzelmann and Daliana Suryawinata of SHAU on behalf of the LafargeHolcim Foundation, the attendance demonstrated local interest in the theme of sustainable construction.

Brinda Somaya is the Principal Architect & Managing Director of Somaya & Kalappa Consultants based in Mumbai, India. She has been involved with the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction since 2014, when she was a member of the Awards jury for Asia Pacific. She became a member of the Board of the Foundation in January 2017. Hashim Sarkis is the Dean of the School of Architecture & Planning at the MIT and the Principal of Hashim Sarkis Studios based in Cambridge, USA, and Beirut, Lebanon. He headed the LafargeHolcim Awards jury for Africa Middle East in 2011 and was a member of the Global Awards jury in 2018. He was also recently appointed curator of the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale and will head the Global LafargeHolcim Awards jury in 2021. Both of them share their experience and views on the awards competition.

50 students from ten European countries participated in the “Zero Carbon Hack” at the global LafargeHolcim Innovation Centre in Lyon, France. Together with a dozen mentors they spent an entire weekend searching for ways to minimize the embodied carbon footprint of a reference building. John Orr, Lecturer in Concrete Structures at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, explained why he believes that up to 50% less material could be used in construction thanks to better design.

What if materials were not just non-toxic but also regenerative – could a building clean the air? Titanium dioxide facade coatings are being studied for pollution capture and a range of studies are underway on carbon sequestration in common materials. Designing for non-toxicity is a first step toward regeneration that can be taken today. Materials that contain chemicals hazardous to human or environmental health are not recyclable, create enduring waste, may harm the workers producing them, and may emit hazardous chemicals – especially if they catch fire.

The latest global LafargeHolcim Awards Silver winning project transformed a derelict mosque into a library that shares its site with a new mosque for the village of Dandaji in Niger. To turn their concept into reality, the architects Yasaman Esmaili and Mariam Kamara relied on a dedicated labor force of local masons, electrical- and metal-workers and technicians. “It was through the efforts and skill of our workforce that the project was successful – everyone involved should be proud of a job well done and the international recognition we received,” said the designers.

The LafargeHolcim Foundation has announced the locations for the five regional ceremonies of the 6th International LafargeHolcim Awards for Sustainable Construction in 2020. The Awards ceremonies will present eleven prizes each to real projects as well as bold ideas that combine sustainable construction solutions with architectural excellence.

R. Buckminster Fuller posed this question, used as the title of a recent documentary, as Norman Foster showed him designs for the ultralightweight Sainsbury Gallery at the University of East Anglia. The question implies that lighter is better – and that reducing the amount of material in a project also reduces the embodied energy of a given structure. This principle is useful to apply in an apples-to-apples scenario: a building with less steel will probably have less embodied energy that a building with more steel.

To coincide with the Bandung Design Biennale, the LafargeHolcim Foundation is conducting a two-hour seminar and dinner on October 31, 2019. Under the theme of “Architecture Awards: No/Maybe/Yes?”, the event will include a presentation by Nirmal Kishnani on transforming architecture and urbanism in Asia, and a discussion panel led by former LafargeHolcim Awards prize winners Florian Heinzelmann and Daliana Suryawinata of SHAU.

LafargeHolcim is on a mission to discover the most sustainable use of concrete at the Zero Carbon Hack. The sponsor of the LafargeHolcim Foundation and Awards competition has launched an open invitation to a 48-hour hackathon to collaborate and produce sustainable building solutions. The Zero Carbon Hack will be held in Lyon, France, on November 15 to 17, 2019.

What if building materials became nutrients for biological or technical cycles? Cradle-to-Cradle thinking proposes re-designing building materials so they can be reused or repurposed after they are reclaimed from buildings, creating value and products out of used material. Materials could be biodegradable or endlessly recyclable – resources that are used and reused rather than discarded and then extracted or produced anew.

A panel discussion staged by the LafargeHolcim Foundation in Paris on the theme “Architecture at what Prize?” confirmed how architectural competitions boost careers for both established and emerging architects. The LafargeHolcim Awards competition also makes tangible the commitment of LafargeHolcim to sustainable development and consolidates the Group’s reputation as a credible and innovative leader of the industry. Moderated by Jean-Philippe Hugron (Le Courrier de l’Architecte), the event at Maison de l’architecture Ile de France echoed the findings of a special issue of the international l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui magazine: Entering architectural competitions boost projects, careers, and networking opportunities.

What if waste did not exist? This sounds like a utopian idea in today’s economy, but waste as we know it is a relatively new concept. Waste is tied to the idea of consumption: commodities are purchased, used, and then discarded. A world of consumers has exploded the amount of waste produced; and produced types of waste that would be unfamiliar to previous generations. Understanding that business-as-usual is not the natural order of things helps generate alternatives. Perhaps, even just redefining the words we use to talk about material flows can also help redefine the infrastructures that produce and move materials.

In Burkina Faso, as in many African countries, architecture is still strongly influenced by European ideals – introduced during the colonial period. Francis Kéré opposes this. In his keynote speech, he showed how he promotes locally anchored, autonomous architecture using local materials.

Foundations 23, the magazine of the LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, is dedicated to the 6th International LafargeHolcim Forum, which took place in Cairo, Egypt. It is an engaging review of how the enormous challenges of re-materializing construction can be tackled – compiled from a top-notch group of international experts who attended the Forum.

LafargeHolcim Awards winners Joana Dabaj and Riccardo Luca Conti from CatalyticAction highlighted the importance of ethical standards and social inclusion at the Strelka “Future Architect” Conference in Moscow, Russia. The winners of the LafargeHolcim Awards Bronze 2017 for Middle East Africa explained how their work not only addressed sustainable design from the perspective of building materials – but also created opportunities to empower local communities.

The first LafargeHolcim Research in Practice Grant (RPG) recipients updated members of the Academic Committee (AC) of the LafargeHolcim Foundation on the progress of their research. The RPG update meeting was held at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and followed on from an initial meeting in April 2019 at the 6th Forum in Cairo. The core aim of the RPG program is to mentor and financially-support emerging professionals to conduct leading edge, practice-related research in the field of sustainable construction.