Mentoring and supporting emerging professionals

The grant recipients are Heidi Boulanger, University of Pretoria, South Africa, who is furthering her research on integrating production facilities for construction material into rural communities, creating new urban nodes. Stefano Romagnoli, Juan Cruz Serafini, and Tomás Pont are using their grant to advance an infrastructure-landscape project for the generation of electric power by harnessing tidal currents they co-developed at the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina. Nada Nafeh, American University in Cairo, Egypt is developing an approach to improve living conditions in informal settlements.

State-of-the-art research

RPG recipients were also shown state-of-the-art research on sustainable construction and materials technology across Switzerland at the Arc-Tec-Lab and NEST. The excursion was hosted by Head of the AC, Marc Angélil, Architect and Professor of Architecture & Design, ETH Zurich, members of the AC Harry Gugger, Professor of Architectural & Urban Design and Head, Laboratoire Bâle (laba), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Dirk Hebel, Professor of Sustainable Construction, Karlsruher Institut für Technologie in Karlsruhe, Germany and Guillaume Habert, Professor of Sustainable Construction, Department of Civil, Environmental & Geomatic Engineering, ETH Zurich as well as Mariana Popescu, PhD researcher, Block Research Group, ETH Zurich.

Arch_Tech_Lab is a new building for the Institute of Technology in Architecture at ETH Zurich’s Hönggerberg Campus. The new building will be characterized by digital fabrication, the implementation of building information modelling (BIM), and the zero-emissions concept and in the process forge new paths within digitalized and process-oriented construction systems in the building industry. The Arch_Tech_Lab allows the most recent findings from research to be tested and ultimately introduced as possible new building systems in the construction industry’s innovation process.

LafargeHolcim Awards – Opportunity for the next generation

The LafargeHolcim Awards seek bold ideas from the next generation that combine sustainable construction solutions with architectural excellence. The recipients of the two-year LafargeHolcim Research in Practice Grant (RPG) of USD 75,000 based on the evaluation of their project were selected from Next Generation prize winners of the 5th LafargeHolcim Awards in 2017.