The AR Awards for Emerging Architecture is the admiration for every fresh architect in the world with £15,000 for the winner. Debuted in 1999, the awards are sponsored by Buro Happold (engineering firm), Interface (carpet manufacturer) and Wilkhahn (furniture provider). With intention to introduce the new face of architects and designers, the Awards succesfully generated participants from more than 80 countries, with its own unique designs.

The awards are giving to realized project only, include buildings, landscapes, urban spaces, and furniture can be submitted. Here the list of 2006 juries: Christine Binswanger (Herzog & de Meuron, Basel), Peter Davey (Former Editor of The Architectural Review), Mark Dytham (Klein Dytham, Tokyo), Kim Herforth Nielsen (3XN, Aarhus), Benedetta Tagliabue (EMBT, Barcelona) and Paul Finch (Editor of The Architectural Review and Chairman). You can visit the AR Awards for Emerging Architecture 2006 exhibition at the RIBA, 66 Portland Place, London lasting to the end of February.

Footbridge

The simple looks of this Miro Rivera Architect’s bridge almost make it unconsiderable for the jury’s appetite, but later it isn’t. The place takes in Texas, a burning hot and dry place. But the bridge gives a delightful, contextual and curiously natural structure. It looks high risk to pass, and a sorry because it is not for public. Hey, its people’s property, you know? The 100ft arch structure spans of 80ft, achieved through the compositions of five 5 inch composed diameter pipes that diverge from the spring point of the main span and the abutments. The pipes hold ½ inch diameter bars which become both decking and guardrail with a simple field bends. Why it was like that are the respond to the reeds on the site that swarm the lake. The bars and reeds intertwine at the abutments and ‘grow’ over the bridge, camouflaging it and turning into symbiotic, making it appear that structure and nature are fusing. For more blending the bridge in its setting the steel is left unfinished, just like the rope handrail and the stone ramps. This is an easy to handle bridge, whose man-made elements have been translated by architecture into unexpected beauty.

Children’s treatment centre

Sou Fujimoto’s building is a treatment centre for disturbed children, a series of centres housing private, public and semi-private spaces tumbling across the landscape. He considers the interiors as providing something akin to the free interpretation of space by primitive man, capable of being used for hiding or enjoyment, separation or connection. The overall planning concept give question: is the centre a large home or a small city? Is it about the intimacy of the single building or the variety of the larger whole? For the residents, who spend time living in the centre, it is what they want or need it to be. They find it as a large-volume spaces filled with filtered natural light, but plenty of opportunity for private contemplation. Fujimoto’s answer is to create a multiplicity of centres in the series of apparently random, but in reality carefully planned, arrangements of the individual buildings. In their ‘external’ relationship to each other, there is no obvious centre to the complex, no hierarchy of buildings or spaces. Internally, the provision of alcove and other semi-private areas allows the residents to occupy their own centre stage, or to use the common space as a centre. The merging of the intentional and the precise into a centre which is in the Fujimoto words, are “vague, unpredictable and filled with unlikelihood,” shifting the balance of power away from the architect imposing form and towards the user, a strong intuitive response to the needs of the children. This strategy addresses two common conditions in disturbed young people: on the one hand feelings of powerlessness and indeed sometimes paranoia, and on the other hand a desire to be able to assert their independent personality.

METI School

METI initiated in 1999 in Rudrapur, a village in the northern part of Bangladesh, is being replicated in Dinajpur town and Osmanpur, Ghoraghat on demand of these areas. The school building was built by experts and volunteers from Germany and Austria together with craftsmen, teachers, parents and students from Bangladesh from September to December 2005. The ultimate goal is to gain and disseminate knowledge and information for optimising the use of locally available resources. The improvement of the building techniques is as important as the economic aspects and the creation of a regional identity. The inventive architecture, allied to traditional materials, has attracted thousands of visitors to the building, which is clement, spacious and colourful. This school is built using brick, loam, straw, bamboo and rope, plus some steel pins. Refining the local technique of using very wet loam to build walls, the school has a brick foundation, a damp proof course, and walls made of a mixture of loam and straw, the latter acting as a form of reinforcement. The Wellerbau technique, a historical earth building technique similar to cob-walling which is ideal for ‘self building’, employed here involves building a 700mm high wall layer, leaving it to dry for two days, and trimming off with a spade. The ceiling and first floor are constructed using bamboo as the chief material. Three layers of bamboo sticks, bamboo boards and an earth filling make the surface of the floor. The upper walls and roof comprise a frame construction using four layers of joined bamboo sticks, and vertical and diagonal poles; steel pins are fixed with nylon lashing from the junction of the sticks.

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