Curry Stone Prize 2013

The Curry Stone Foundation has named three winners of the 2013 Curry Stone Design Prize: Hunnarshala (Bhuj, India), Proximity Designs (Yangon, Myanmar), and Studio TAMassociati/Emergency (Venice/Milan, Italy).

The annual prize, in its sixth year, is one of the most recognized social impact design awards, celebrating socially engaged practitioners and the influence and reach of design as a force for improving lives and strengthening communities. The Curry Stone Foundation awards $120,000 per year. For the past two years, the amount has been divided equally among the Prize winners.

Each winner will receive a no-strings-attached grant; winners are also the subjects of short documentary films produced by the Curry Stone Foundation.

"The Prize is dedicated to telling the stories of our winners," said Chee Pearlman, Prize Curator. "Through the medium of short documentaries, we're able to spread the word about vibrant, groundbreaking practices that may not otherwise be revealed."

The Curry Stone Foundation has partnered with the annual Design Like You Give a Damn Live! conference, hosted by Architecture for Humanity, to present this year’s winning projects. The two-day event focuses on humanitarian design and community development through discussions, presentations, and workshops. It will kick off with the Curry Stone Design Prize awards ceremony on the evening of Nov. 7th in San Francisco; the ceremony will also be live-streamed for global audience.

Hunnarshala, founded in the wake of the 2001 earthquake in Gujarat, India, facilitates artisan-led reconstruction in post-disaster areas, as well as long-term
redevelopment of cities and informal settlements. Hunnarshala taps the skills of local artisans and builders who have deep knowledge of resilient building systems and delivers high-quality, sustainable, and disaster-safe housing. These collaborations lead to new hybrid solutions that elevate vernacular architecture to innovation. The group’s experiments also spark the reuse of formerly unusable industrial waste, such as waste wood from shipwrecks (now joined into thin strips for flooring, doors, and window frames). Hunnarshala has worked on disaster rehabilitation in India (Gujarat, Tamil Nadu, Kashmir and Bihar), Iran, Indonesia and Afghanistan. It has helped build more than 30,000 interim shelters and almost 12,000 permanent reconstructions.

Proximity Designs is a sustainable development group that works to improve the lives of the rural poor in Myanmar. The nonprofit boosts agricultural productivity by designing, producing, and distributing affordable equipment for people living on less than $2 a day. Proximity’s products—pedal-powered irrigation pumps, gravity-fed drip irrigation systems, and portable water storage tanks—help reduce daily hardships like hauling tons of water. Extreme affordability is a main tenet of Proximity’s design philosophy: the Baby Elephant, an all-plastic pump that can extract 850 gallons per hour, costs only $17, but it can increase a farmer’s net income by up to $200 in a single growing season. In a country where infrastructure is underdeveloped, Proximity has had to create its own ecosystem in order to deliver its services to the farmers who most need them. All manufacturing is done in Myanmar, and distribution is hyperlocal: Products are sold in larger cities and market towns and a network of more than 800 independent agents work on the village level. To address
the country’s credit famine, farmers are offered low-rate installment loans.

Studio TAMassociati is an Italian nonprofit architecture firm recognized for designing health-care facilities in war-torn areas. TAM champions human rights–based design in partnership with Emergency, an Italian NGO that provides medical treatment to victims of war. The decade-long collaboration has resulted in a replicable model for free, high-quality health care and educational facilities in the Sudan, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Together, TAM and Emergency have built five hospitals in Africa that have treated more than 700,000 patients. One of those, the Salam Centre, in Khartoum, Sudan, is the only hospital in the region providing free specialized cardiac care.

As an extension of their efforts to treat civilians affected by war, TAM and Emergency have collaborated on seven clinics in Italy to provide health care to refugees. Emergency’s goal is to create clinics that meet—or exceed—Western standards while respecting local traditions. TAM translates the mission of Emergency into architectural reality. TAM and Emergency bring cutting-edge health-care facilities and architecture into areas where there are none. The team has redefined health care by showing how a hospital can become a cultural lifeline and health can be a bridge for peace. Representing Studio TAMassociati and Emergency at the awards event are Raul Pantaleo and Rossella Miccio. Pantaleo cofounded TAM and is a senior architect and graphic designer at the firm. Miccio is the Humanitarian Office Coordinator at Emergency’s headquarters in Milan.

In addition to the three 2013 Prize Winners, the Curry Stone Foundation is recognizing Architecture for Humanity’s cofounders, Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair, with the first Vision Award. They will be honored with a short documentary capturing their devotion to humanitarian design and the impact they’ve made by inspiring and leading more than a decade of work through, Architecture for Humanity, which continues to address much-needed design solutions globally.