The UIC Barcelona School of Architecture lecturer Kathrin Golda-Pongratz received a 2019 FAD Award in the category of Thought and Criticism for her work as the co-author and co-editor (with José Luis Oyon and Volker Zimmermann) of the book Autoconstrucción. Por una autonomía del habitar. Escritos sobre vivienda, urbanismo, autogestión y holismo (Self-building: Towards an autonomy of housing. Writings on housing, town planning, self-management and holism), published by Pepitas de Calabaza. 

The volume contains selected works by the English architect John F. C. Turner (1927) and seeks to offer Spanish-speaking readers a window onto hitherto little known aspects of his life and career, such as his reports for international agencies, articles in the political press and previously unpublished thoughts about the construction of place and the social processes behind the self-building of housing around the world. “The book is the product of a long collaboration and ongoing conversation with the architect John Turner, whose devotion to space and community creation processes piqued an essential interest in us. Beyond his creative and open vision of self-built housing, Turner is an author who has spent much of his life developing a philosophy of housing and a conception of the relationships between space and society. That vision is what we wanted to make accessible to readers, to help turn it into a tool for explaining place-making processes”, Professor Golda-Pongratz explained. 

The judges for this year’s edition, Roger Miralles, Maria Teresa Blanch and Ivan Blari, highlighted “the book’s timeliness in addressing the debate over public housing by recovering, translating and analysing texts by this little-known English architect and ideologist, focused on experiences from the 1950s and 1970s in Britain, Peru and the US. Although it examines aspects from the past, the book is a tool for current town planning practice.” A total of 81 works were submitted in the Thought and Criticism category of this year’s edition of the awards. 

Given by the FAD Interdisciplinary Association of Space Design (ARQUIN-FAD), the FAD Awards have become a benchmark for professionals in the fields of architecture, interior design and urban planning. The award ceremony was held on 19 June at Disseny Hub Barcelona, which, until September, will be hosting the exhibition “The Best Design of the Year”, featuring all the finalists from this year’s edition.