With 90+ categories and 300+ jurors, the Architizer A+Awards is the world’s definitive architectural awards program. In anticipation of the Awards Gala and Phaidon book launch on May 14, we are pleased to take a closer look at some of the winners of the 2015 Awards program — see all of them here.
DinellJohansson won the 2015 A+Awards, Jury Award, for the Sport & Recreation: Stadium/Arena Category with Lidingövallen. Lidingövallen is literally a stand on a building that incorporates strategic meeting points for the football club and everyone else in between.
Firm name: DinellJohansson
Location: Olofsgatan 12, Stockholm
Education: KTH-A
Design hero and/or favorite building (and why):
Kulturhuset, Stockholm, arch. Peter Celsing. Why? Hybrid use that really works, generic floor-plans with amazing spatial qualities, structural expression; no middle scale, city in a building.
What do you find exciting about architecture and design right now?
Hybrid use and organization of space and buildings.
Tell us something that people might not know about your A+Award submission:
To celebrate the inauguration of the small stadium, we arranged a football/soccer cup for architects. The club officials with whom we have become good friends sponsored the event with the usage of their facilities and referees from their youth organization. It turned out to be a big success with 16 participating teams. Winners were AIX architects. It will be a yearly event with qualification rounds as considerably more than 16 studios want to participate.
Among your fellow A+Award winners, what is/are your favorite(s)?
Several amazing projects — Angdong Hospital, for one.
What is the most important quality in an architect?
The ability to reboot conceptual and formal ideas without losing momentum is extremely important. The quality of a project needs to be reinvented several times in the process of implementation. You need a lot of endurance and creative (problem-solving) energy. Ability to create interesting shapes or management style is of very low priority in our view. In the end, the most important thing is the ability to love people and the ability to love the irregularities and contradictions of life and society. Obviously this goes for any profession, but not least for architects.
See all of the 2015 A+Award Winners here and all of the Winner Q+As here — and order the book from Phaidon here.