Archnec 2019 – Winners and Honourable mentions

Winning projects and motivation:

A home of sport, community and celebration Pingelly Recreation and Cultural Centre by Iredale Pedersen Hook Architects with Advanced Timber Concepts Studio, Australia

Pingelly Recreation and Cultural Centre is given a prize is given for the project’s informal lightness in creating a low-threshold meeting place based on local culture, built in local materials and with the complex of different spaces held together by an open verandah, a sidewalk in nowhere. Pingelly is a small town with some 1000 inhabitants. It is situated in the sparsely populated “Wheatbelt” of Western Australia. It has all the problems of similar areas with ageing population and diminishing employment. Sport has traditionally been important in both the white and Aboriginal communities. The new sports centre is a Shire initiative, responding to popular demand. Four pavilions with a Function centre with bar, a Sports hall with change rooms, a gym and storage spaces are linked together by a verandah facing east towards the already established sports fields. The verandah forms a welcoming “breezeway”, tempering the hot climate. All visible surfaces are of prefabricated Eucalyptus wood, locally grown and processed in thick sections to stand the harsh climate. It is the first civic timber building in Western Australia for almost a century. Iredale Pedersen Hook Architects were founded in 1999, working in a landscape “dominated by the horizon” with sustainable buildings. The same office was given a prize in the Architecture of Necessity competition in 2016 for a home for elderly aborigines.

Stokkøya – Investigating the potential of rural communities by Pir II, Norway

Stokkøya local development in a rural community is given a prize for a playful architecture, based on a local initiative to develop a remote local neighbourhood, with modern buildings of great typological inventiveness and skilful reuse of materials, well adapted to the local context. Stokkøya is an island on the Atlantic coast north of Trondheim in Western Norway. The project was initiated in the early 2000s by a local farmer who did not want to see his community decay. A Beach Bar, a building with workshops, brewery and food lab, a Beach Hotel and family dwellings and small cottages have been built in a more than one kilometre long area around a bay, open to the sea. Tourism is an asset thus exploited in a remote location, but at the same time it gives job opportunities for permanent inhabitants. Recycled materials and half climatized zones of buildings are part of the concept of sustainable building. Pir II Architects were founded in Trondheim in 1994 with the aim to design “good, playful and sustainable architecture”.

Healing Garden by ZRS Architekten, Germany

Healing Garden Trauma Therapy Centre is given a prize for the project’s beautiful and ecologically and socially responsible reuse of traditional typologies and technologies in a modern interpretation, based on diligent work with both principles and local conditions. Chamchamal is a town populated through forced resettlement. The Trauma Centre, run by The Jiyan Foundation for Human Rights, provides therapy for victims of war. The Garden is a meeting point between patients and the neighbourhood. The traditional typology of the courtyard house and the use of earth blocks covered with clay straw plaster is not only a proper building method given the local conditions, but also offer patients a connection to pre-resettlement habitats. At the same time the modern pavilion system opens up the gardens to the neighbourhood. The whole healing Garden will take many years to complete with a bakery, an open-air theatre and community spaces as well as workshops for traditional crafts, used in the therapy. The office ZRS are specialized in building in traditional materials and since its start in 2003 engaged in design and research aimed at minimizing the use of fossil resources.