Multipurpose building for Kingston University wins EU Mies Van der Rohe Award

Elevation of Town House, winner of the 2022 Mies Van de Rohe Award. / CR

The Spaniards of the Lacol collective win the Emerging Prize with a housing cooperative in Barcelona

The Irish studio Grafton Architects, founded by the architects Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, and responsible for the Town House multipurpose building for Kingston University in London, is the winner of the 2022 Mies van der Rohe Prize, the biannual award for Contemporary Architecture from the European Union. The 2022 Emerging Prize has gone to the La Borda cooperative housing, designed and built in Barcelona by the Lacol group of architects.

It is the first time that this esteemed award has been awarded to a university building, which in this case hosts dance, library and study spaces “using layers of silence and layers of sound that work perfectly together”. The London university has already won the Stirling Prize, and its authors won the Pritzker Prize in 2020.

They are awarded this time "for the remarkable environmental quality" of the multipurpose academic building "which creates an excellent environment for studying, meeting, dancing and meeting." The ruling highlights how the building "creates an emotional experience from within and through the multi-level façade colonnade creates a domestic atmosphere on different levels".

The university building "shows the potential of public educational projects with quality, which dignifies people's lives through education and coexistence and gives equal educational opportunities to all".

Regarding the La Borda cooperative housing, the jury highlights that it is a "cooperative project based on a model of co-ownership, co-management of resources and shared capacities" and "the importance of an architecture that delves into the possibility of changing mentalities and policies and the relevance of inclusion.

It is an initiative "transgressive in its context" given that "housing production is mainly dominated by macroeconomic interests," the ruling said. Beyond the specific cooperative housing project, the project "is also developed as a cooperative where fourteen professionals with different backgrounds offer a model to follow and an active tool to promote political and urban change from within the system, based on social, ecological and and social and economic sustainability. The owner of La Borda is the City Council that gives the houses for 75 years.

The jury that awarded both awards was chaired by Tatiana Bilbao and made up of Francesca Ferguson, Mia Hägg, Triin Ojari, Georg Pendl, Spiros Pengas and Marcel Smets. The winners were chosen from among five finalists, including another Spanish project, a complex of 85 Social Housing Units in Cornellà de Llobregat (Barcelona), by the Peris+Toral Arquitectes studio.

A total of 523 projects from 41 countries competed for the Mies van der Rohe Prize, which is awarded every two years and seeks to recognize and reward the quality of architectural production in Europe. Its delivery will take place on May 12, 2022 at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona.