The jury and the public have had their say — feast your eyes on the winners of Architizer's 14th Annual A+Awards. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive future program updates.
Architecture is often judged in an instant. Almost immediately, an impressive façade or an extraordinary room can influence us to form an opinion about the space. However, some buildings require more time and patience to reveal their most important qualities. On a first visit, we tend to notice the spectacular: the silhouette, the material palette, the defining spatial gesture. But a second encounter with an already familiar space frees us to notice subtler nuances: how an old structure survives beneath a new one, or how the building changes when it is occupied differently. These seven A+Award-winning projects invite us to “look again.”
Together, these seven projects remind us that while a first visit may reveal an architect’s intentions, it is often only on returning that a building begins to reveal a life of its own.
Design Studies Collaborative
By O’Neill Rose Architects, Brooklyn, New York
Jury Winner, Commercial Adaptive Reuse Project, 14th Architizer A+Awards
This building was originally a Boys and Girls Club. In the 1950s, it became a dancehall that is still fondly remembered. The 1960s brought about new life as a Byzantine church. The church closed its doors in 2001, and after 25 years, O’Neill Rose Architects gave it new life by transforming it into a nonprofit and design workspace.
This succession of its former identities is not immediately visible. The restrained interior gradually directs attention towards what survived, balancing the new material and spatial additions with the preserved façade or the old wood-joist ceiling. In truth, this is a building that has already been visited by several different lives. Visiting it twice mirrors the design itself – the first encounter reveals what it has become; the second invites us to notice what remains of everything it has been.
Ministry Rijkskantoor B37
By studio PROTOTYPE and ZENBER ARCHITECTEN, The Hague, Netherlands
Jury Winner, Government & Civic Buildings, 14th Architizer A+Awards
Upon first visit, the Orangerie – a lush, light-filled green oasis makes a very strong visual impression. It acts as a dramatic glass volume filled with trees, planted terraces and a green-painted structure that bridges various spaces, turning the historic office complex into a government workplace shared by two ministries. Yet, this overwhelming complexity of ecological infrastructure hides details that are easy to miss. The biobased brainstorm pods, for example, serve as experimental testbeds for renewable materials. In time, it becomes clear that this “environmental ambition” is actually the building’s organizing system. It connects old structures, regulates the interior environment and gives social life to what was once a conventional government complex.
26 Point 2 Apartments
By Michael Maltzan Architecture, Long Beach, California
Jury Winner, Affordable Housing, 14th Architizer A+Awards
The project has two personalities. This five-story permanent supportive-housing development operates in two scales and presents two very different public fronts. From the Pacific Coast Highway, it appears as a tall, assertive urban block calibrated to traffic and large-scale infrastructure. From the residential streets behind it, the mass steps down toward neighboring houses. But the duality does not stop there. Its pale exterior conceals a colorful inner world, porous and communal. Only by returning – and approaching it from another direction – does the building’s full character come into view.
Moon Pavilion
By Atelier Guo, Huizhou, China
Popular Winner, Architecture+ Art, 14th Architizer A+Awards
This, perhaps, is the most striking example of a project people need to visit twice: once in daylight and once beneath the moon it imitates. It is a small cultural pavilion, developed from the spatial and material language of an abandoned agricultural greenhouse. Inspired by an ancient Chinese poem, the design recombines the motifs of moon, water, flowers and boat, thus creating an architecture filled with metaphors. The structure is both seasonal and ethereal, with its apparent opacity becoming visible the closer one gets. A semi-transparent skin conceals a fully grown, existing wetland, filled with vegetation that changes every season.
Shield & Shelter – Muskoka Cottage
By Barbora Vokac Taylor Architect Inc., Muskoka District Municipality, Ontario
Jury Winner, Architecture+Home, 14th Architizer A+Awards
This year-round family cottage has time on its side. The material palette choices were specifically selected to register and record the passing seasons. Charred cedar and zinc – two materials that naturally weather and require little maintenance – clad the structure, while the façade is comprised of strategically placed “viewfinders” that shift with every passing day. Finally, the house deliberately withholds its scale. On arrival, it presents a single-story profile beneath a low black roof. Only while descending with the terrain does its full three-level organization become visible. The first encounter is a shield; the second reveals the shelter beneath it.
Down in the Clouds
By Increments Studio and Practice on Earth, Zhejiang, China
Jury Winner, Architecture+ Innovation, 14th Architizer A+Awards
From a distance, these pavilions read as distinct, playful sculptures: three weird-looking objects dispersed along rice fields. However, within each one, the collision of soft air and heavy steel produces an entirely different room: a container becomes a tiered cinema, a series of inflated spheres becomes a luminous reading room, and a tower-like structure becomes a sheltered café. Only by moving between — and then entering — all three does the project reveal itself as a single architectural experiment in three acts.
The Garzón School
By Rosan Bosch Studio, Uruguay
Popular Winner, Architecture +Learning, 14th Architizer A+Awards
The Garzón School should be experienced inside-out. On the first visit, people see a school in a park; on the second, they understand that the park is the school. This nature-based elementary school in rural Uruguay is incomplete without its students. Timber buildings, paths and playful forms set up the “context” within which students experiment, without however prescribing any one way of experiencing the space. This, in addition to the native vegetation that is constantly changing, crafts a setting that is never encountered in quite the same way twice.
The jury and the public have had their say — feast your eyes on the winners of Architizer's 14th Annual A+Awards. Subscribe to our Awards Newsletter to receive future program updates.
Featured Image: Moon Pavilion by Atelier Guo, Huizhou, China | Popular Choice Winner, Architecture+ Art, 14th Architizer A+Awards
