The examples show how attitudes towards sustainability have transformed and were selected and appraised by the Executive Editor and publisher of ‘A’A’, Antoine Vernholes, and architecture and design critic for the Financial Times, Edwin Heathcote. The Holcim Awards prize-winning projects show the importance of using sophisticated approaches that address environmental performance but also further progress regarding enhanced social, financial and aesthetic outcomes.
The magazine highlights the responsiveness of the competition to promote solutions to the contemporary challenges such as rapid urbanization at the edges between wealth and poverty, alongside robust projects in the context of slower economic growth. This multi-faceted view of sustainability demands a new and more symbiotic conceptualization of building lifecycles, infrastructure, resource management, and the application of technology and techniques.
The projects featured in the ‘A’A’ special issue include a selection of Holcim Awards (main), Acknowledgement, and “Next Generation” prize-winning projects to be realized in Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Italy, Mauritania, Mexico, Nepal, Nigeria, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, and the USA. Following the five regional competitions in 2014, the 4th cycle will conclude with the Global Holcim Awards 2015 for which the top three projects from each region are automatically nominated.