On Friday, 8 May 2015, Jonathan Arnabat, Jordi Ayala-Bril, Aitor Fuentes and Igor Urdampilleta, the ESARQ School of Architecture alumni and lecturers who make up the Catalan Arquitectura G studio, received the prestigious Mies van der Rohe 2015 Emerging Architect Special Mention for “Luz House”. They received the awards at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona.
Cino Zucchi, president of the jury, highlighted the simplicity and clarity of Luz House’s spaces, as well as its high environmental quality and the colour palette that can be seen in the building. “This project shows that good architecture needn’t necessarily be prohibitively expensive”, he said.
The Luz House in Cilleros (Cáceres) is a completely reformed building in which only the façades have been kept. “The structure and construction are overwhelming in their simplicity. The work shows its materiality without complexes and deliberately contrasts the irregular textures of the garden wall and the stones, which have been whitewashed. We wanted an atmosphere where the ceramics’ red colour and the birch tree’s intense green would predominate. We wanted light to shine through these materials to bathe the walls and floors in different hues throughout the day. The ceramic material itself gives us the texture and the warm colour we were hoping for, so paints and false roofs were not necessary”, wrote Arquitectura G.
A piece by another Catalan Studio, the Szczecin Philharmonic Hall by Barozzi Veiga, made up of School of Architecture lecturers from the 2008-09 academic year, was one of four finalists and ultimately selected for the Mies van der Rohe Award 2015. Its architects point out that its design is marked by its context, especially “the verticality of the city’s residential buildings, the monumental quality of its neo-gothic churches’ vertical details, the abundance of classicist buildings, the towers that pepper the horizon and the cranes at its port”.
All pieces considered for this edition of the Mies van der Rohe award can be seen until Tuesday, 9 June 2015 in the MHUBA Oliva Arts Centre (Parc Central del Poblenou) at an exhibition conceived by architect Jorge Vidal, ESARQ Forums lecturer.
The Mies van der Rohe Award is a biennial competition whose primary objective is to recognize and laud excellence in the field of architecture and to highlight the important contributions of European professionals to the development of new concepts and technologies. The competition was first held in 1988. In 2000, it also began honouring the work of young professionals through the Emerging Architect Special Mention. The award has been the European Union’s official architecture prize since 2001.
