European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Award

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The Tartu Nature House is a symbiosis between a zoo, botanical garden and school inspired by tree stump.

Rotterdam Centraal Station is one of the most important transport hubs in The Netherlands. With 110,000 passengers a day the public transport terminal has as many travelers as Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. In addition to the European network of the High Speed Train (HST), Rotterdam Centraal is also connected to the light rail system, RandstadRail. With the advent of both the HST and RandstadRail the number of daily travelers at Rotterdam Centraal is expected to increase to approximately 323,000 by 2025.

The main architectural idea was provided by its siting in the Pavilniai Regional Park : the house has to dissolve in the landscape. Curved roofs all the way to the ground, and fluid forms extended by timber pergolas, are the most important architectural means achieving this effect.

Airfield is a 35-acre working farm and estate located in the southern suburbs of Dublin, open to the public since 1998; it is an area of pastureland, woodland and walled gardens into which a patchwork of buildings has been introduced focused on Airfield House itself, which was the Overend family home from 1894. Airfield Trust was established in 1974 by the Overend sisters, Letitia and Naomi, as a charitable organisation with an educational and recreational remit provided through an environment connecting people and nature through the farm and gardens. To enhance the visitor experience and expand the facilities at Airfield a number of key spatial drivers have been put in place:

The municipality of Borsele in the Dutch province of Zeeland was founded in 1970 by the merging of 13 villages. Heinkenszand was assigned centre of this newly formed administrative unit and a new town hall was built for the 25.000 inhabitants. More then 30 years after the opening, the building was in need of rehabilitation. On the one hand, the façade as well as the roof weren’t fully waterproof anymore. Furthermore, the building had to undergo an asbestos abatement to adapt to modern building standards. On the other hand the interior of the building had to be renovated in order to create a flexible and modern office environment. The building climate had to be improved in order to reduce energy loss.

The design is carefully inserted into the urban fabric of the Tudela old quarter. This area is signified by the Jewish, Muslim and Christian footprints. Yet, the surroundings are defined by the massive condition derived from its medieval heritage. The narrow and tortuous streets are characterized by the texturized rendered walls and the wood galleries. The house merges into this both cultural and physical preexistence.

The Coop Housing is a jointly developed and administered project building upon experience gained from many previous self-made projects.

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Jára Cimrman is a fictitious Czech national giant. He excelled in many roles - as an inventor, scientist, playwright, poet, composer, artist, teacher, traveler, philosopher, detective, mathematician, pilot, sportsman and dentist.  In his case, you can hardly find a profession that he has not made a radical contribution to.

The cathedral, an inventor's workshop for audiovisual design, forms a building that operates in the field of tension between two different landscapes, both as form and as idea.

Design concepts & site conditions

Emerging under same socio-economic parameters as majority of houses in Bosnia and Herzegovina- within a small budget, an underdeveloped construction industry, deregulated urban planning conditions and chaotic building permit bureaucracy- house NHRV tries to subvert the banal reality of contemporary House and Nation Building in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H). It challenges the status quo of contemporariness, by being an extraordinary response to its immediate and wider context through inherently ordinary means.

H71a was a shop adjacent to the timber house at Hverfisgata 71. In 2001 Studio Granda converted the house into a studio, office and archive for photographer Sigurgeir Sigurjónsson. The shop, that had an unsound structure, was left vacant.

“A great empty space, a square + two pavillions”

The new library is located on a large rectangular plot in the center of Girona. Bounded on the north by busy Avenue Emili Grahit, the site is embedded in a dense and compact neighborhood of tall residential blocks. These urban conditions – plus the fact that this is the largest library in the network of public libraries in Catalunya – contributed to the development of a design strategy based on two main considerations.

Creating a new access to one of the most remarkable cultural monuments and landscapes in Europe is a rare challenge for the design of a causeway.

The new Vorarlberg museum completes the row of several culture buildings at the waterside of Lake Constance. The extraordinary concept is based on the principle of architectural continuity and it expands a listed building vertically and horizontally generating a new building form not by contrast but by contact of all parts differentiating them only by their surface structure.

Piri Reis Maritime University provides higher maritime education and applied training in Tuzla district of Istanbul, Turkey. The project consists 60.000 sqm covered area in eight interconnected blocks. The campus is designed with the utmost contemporary sustainability principles that resulted with the BREEAM's "very good" certificate.

The European Commission and the Fundació Mies van der Rohe have selected 420 projects to compete for the 2015 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. The nominations span 36 countries, with the most nominated projects coming from Spain. Twenty-seven percent of the shortlisted projects are housing related, while 24% are cultural facilities, 11% are education-related and the remaining 33% are sport, commercial, governmental, transport and urban projects.