Saint-Gobain Award 2016
KADK won three great prizes when this year’s Saint-Gobain Awards - Denmark’s biggest competition for recently qualified architects and architecture students - were presented at a reception at the Aarhus School of Architecture. This year’s theme was innovative sustainability.
What is the architect’s innovative response to society’s desire for sustainable indoor environments? This was the question, which 66 newly qualified architects from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture and the Aarhus School of Architecture attempted to answer with their entries in the competition: Saint-Gobain 2016: Comfort and Architecture.
The winner of the Saint-Gobain Award 2016 was Angus James Hardwick from the Aarhus School of Architecture. Hardwick received a price of DKK 50,000 for his project, ‘Paradoxes of the Pellucid’, a futuristic floating research dwelling attached to an existing museum in London, which the judges praised for being well substantiated, innovative and solid.
Thermal park and seed library
The 2nd prize of DKK 20,000 went to Rasmus Bruun from KADK for his project, ‘Microclimatic habitats in search of atmospheric aesthetics’. In his project, Rasmus Bruun created a seed library and a thermal park, which together serve as a public, recreational green oasis for the city’s residents. The proposal combines microclimatic requirements with an aesthetic ambition for a new recreational area next to an abandoned industrial district in Berlin.
The jury “… commends the proposal for being an extremely concrete and realisable take on modern society’s need for sustainable architectural environments, and sees great potential for further developing elements of the concept in the context of other building typologies such as housing.”
Warmer air in public spaces
The 3rd prize of DKK 5,000 went to Lyn Poon from KADK for the project, ‘Thermal [Mass] Customisation’. In her graduation project, Lyn Poon researched how to manage and apply thermal energy in public spaces by using a heat conduction system above and below ground, maybe providing us with warmer air and milder days into the bargain.
The jury said, for example: “The proposal has helped to expand Saint-Gobain’s notion of environments with particular emphasis on indoor comfort and commends it doe its ability to interpret the theme of the competition in an entirely new way.”
Two Upcoming Bachelor Prizes were also awarded to two undergraduate projects. One went to Frederik Kastrup Østerberg and Adrian Hildrum from KADK’s School of Architecture; the other went to Hanna Højgaard Molden from the Aarhus School of Architecture.
