arcVision Prize

Portuguese Architect Ines Lobo is the winner of the arcVision Prize – Women and Architecture 2014, the award that Italcementi devotes to women in architecture and that, on the company’s 150th anniversary, pays tribute to Lina Bo Bardi on the centenary of her birth.

Ms Lobo was chosen by the Jury, whose members this year were Shaikha Al Maskari (member of the board of the Arab International Women’s Forum-AIWF), Vera Baboun (Mayor of Bethlehem), Odile Decq , Louisa Hutton (English founding partner of the Sauerbruch Hutton architectural practice), Suhasini Maniratnam (an Indian actress, producer and writer deeply involved in community service), Samia Nkrumah (president of the Kwame Nkrumah Pan-African Center), Kazuyo Sejima (owner with Ryue Nishizawa of the SANAA architectural practice in Tokyo), Benedetta Tagliabue (founding partner with Enric Miralles of the EMBT architectural firm in Barcelona), Martha Thorne (director of the Pritzker Prize), Elena Zambon (chairman of the Italian pharmaceuticals company Zambon).

The arcVision Prize recognizes the innovation and sustainability of the projects and constructions presented, with a special focus on the standards of technological innovation, environmental quality, cost-effective use of resources, social responsibility, functional and aesthetic research.

In Ines Lobo architecture, building conversion plays an important role, giving her an opportunity to free herself from the pre-constituted models of classic Modernism. Among her outstanding projects, many of which are in the public realm and located in Portugal, is the Art and Architecture Faculty in Evora, where annexes were substituted with new construction and the courtyard newly configured. Taking inspiration from the existing industrial architecture and its systems, she defined strategies to employ in the new construction, yet her work is clearly contemporary – informed by the past, but looking toward the future. In the office building for the headquarters of Ferreira Construction, she balanced the existing building, green space and the new construction. Using translucent material to manage the light entering the new building, she creates an interesting facade that changes throughout the hours of day and night.

The Jury, whose meetings were coordinated by the Scientific Director of the Prize, Stefano Casciani, also awarded Special Mentions to Austrian Anna Heringer, Germany, Indian Shimul Jhaveri Kadri and Chilean Cecilia Puga.

Anna Heringer’s vision focuses on the social and cultural responsibility of architecture, which she also sees as a tool to raise users’ awareness of their right to quality of life through the quality of buildings. Her most significant projects in this sense are the Training Center in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, where she experiments with “poor” techniques and intelligent solutions for integrated sustainability, and a small hospitality project in China: two hostels for young men and women and a guest-house, where she re-formulates local construction techniques (stone and earth bricks) in traditional shapes, re-interpreted through her use of color and light.

Shimul Jhaveri Kadri distinguishes herself for an eclectic language, ranging from citations from the Indian tradition (such as the terracotta used on the roof of a factory in Karur) to the elegant modernism of the offices for Nirvana Film, one of her best-known projects. This “flexible inspiration” enables Kadri to develop work environments that are both innovative and comfortable, balancing the needs of the company with those of the workers.

Cecilia Puga is the first South American (not Brazilian) designer nominated for the arcVision Prize, Puga represents Chile, one of the geopolitical areas of greatest interest with its new generation of architects who have developed separately from the international mainstream. Puga is more interested in structural solutions that give buildings greater freedom and flexibility, than in surface aesthetics. One of her first works, the Bahia Azul holiday home, draws on a poetic and humorous inspiration with its play of inverted volumes.

The Prize is a two-week research workshop at i.lab, the Italcementi Group R&D Center in Bergamo, and an amount of € 50,000, part of which may be devolved to social projects, at the discretion of the winner. On completion of the workshop the winner will recount her experience in a lecture delivered at i.lab, during Milan Design Week, as part of the series of Italcementi Group “Millennium” meetings with the world of Architecture.