On July 3 in Ho Chi Minh City the Global Holcim Silver Award 2009 and $200,000 in prize money was presented to the architecture project for a low-impact greenfield university campus in Vietnam. It was Vietnam’s first winning project in the Holcim Awards.
Designed by Japanese architect Kazuhiro Kojima with contributions from architects Daisuke Sanuki from Japan and Vo Trong Nghia from Vietnam, the new university campus aspires to achieve harmony between both people and the environment in the Mekong Delta. To receive the awards it beat almost 5,000 sustainable construction plans and visions from 121 countries entered in the competition.
Principal and founder of Ashok B Lall Architects from New Delhi in India, Ashok B Lall, represented the Holcim Awards juries at the awards ceremony. The internationally-acclaimed architect praised the project for exhibiting the sensible use and management of natural resources throughout its life cycle. “The project avoids massive reclamation of land and emulates the traditions of Southeast Asian agricultural civilisation,” he said. “It blends light, wind and water to allow its ecological footprint to be minimised.”
The Holcim Awards is an international competition of the Swiss-based Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, which is an arm of Holcim Ltd – one of the world’s leading suppliers of cement and aggregates with companies in more than 70 countries, including Holcim (Vietnam) Ltd. in Ho Chi Minh City.
The competition celebrates innovative, future-oriented and tangibly sustainable construction projects and visions from around the globe and provides total prize money of $2 million each three-year competition cycle. The main Holcim Awards category is open to professionals from architecture, landscape and urban design, civil and mechanical engineering and related disciplines.
The Global Holcim Gold Award 2009 went to a river remediation and urban development scheme in Morocco, centered upon the restoration of the river through the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Fez. The Bronze Award, meanwhile, went to a rural design for a suburban village in the Chinese capital of Beijing. The “Innovation” prize was presented to the design of a flexible bus shelter-like structure that offers cover, benches, washrooms, a kitchen and an education/training space for day workers in San Francisco.
The Global Holcim Awards illustrate the broad scope of approaches to sustainable construction from all regions of the world. CEO of Holcim Ltd, Mr Markus Akermann, who chaired the Awards ceremony in his capacity as Chairman of the Management Board of the Holcim Foundation, said that the entries reflected the importance of international cooperation in developing solutions to the demanding challenges of sustainable construction. “Exploring sustainable approaches for the built environment is best achieved through innovation and leveraging the broad perspectives of international project teams – as this project clearly illustrates,” he said.
Chair of the OECD Round Table on Sustainable Development, the Rt Hon Simon Upton, commended the Holcim Awards for promoting critical interdisciplinary and long-range perspectives and showcasing a range of projects that demonstrate sustainable construction in practice. “The basic needs of society in terms of the built environment must be identified at a local level, but that doesn’t prevent the exchange of good ideas, experience, and know-how”, he said. Mr Upton is a founding member of the Advisory Board of the Holcim Foundation.
Along with the Holcim Awards, the Holcim Foundation leads a range of sustainability initiatives. The next Forum will be held in Mexico City in April 2010 with the theme “Re-inventing Construction”. The Holcim Awards encourage architects, planners, engineers and project owners to go beyond conventional notions of sustainable construction in their work and harmonise ecological, social and economic concerns. The third Holcim Awards cycle opens for entries on July 1, 2010.
The primary objective of the Holcim Foundation is the non-commercial promotion and development of sustainable construction at national, regional, and global levels. Utilising the global reach of the Holcim Group, the Holcim Foundation accelerates progress towards sustainable construction, encouraging initiatives in support of sustainable approaches to the provision of housing and infrastructure in developing and industrialised nations alike. The Holcim Foundation seeks to unite diverse global expertise and increase awareness of the critical role of the built environment in sustainability. Promoting best practice, pioneering fresh solutions, and inspiring young architects, engineers, planners, developers and contractors to adopt sustainable parameters for all their building projects are just a few of its ambitious objectives. VET