July 23, 2007—The Zumtobel Group has announced the winners of the first international Zumtobel Group Award for Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment. Designed to commend outstanding sustainable and humanitarian solutions in contemporary architecture and engineering, the award carries a purse of EUR 140,000, shared among two categories.
In the category “Built Environment,” the jury honored Morphosis Architects, Los Angeles, CA, for the San Francisco Federal Building. In this recently completed project, the jury said that Pritzker Prize laureate Thom Mayne “combined leading-edge sustainable technology with intelligent design strategies to create an architectural landmark of outstanding aesthetic quality.”
The “Research and Initiative” category award went to Schlaich Bergermann Solar, Stuttgart, Germany, for the design of the Solar Updraft Tower. The jury expressed the hope that the award for this alternative power plant would encourage the widespread use of this technology, saying the project “represents an important and extremely valuable contribution to the future of mankind.”
The two winning projects were selected from a worldwide total of 40, proposed by a global network of experts in architecture and engineering. The independent, interdisciplinary, and international 9-person jury applied wide-ranging criteria from the fields of sustainability and humanity, from environmental and aesthetic quality to high ethical, social, and economic standards.
In addition to the awards, there were honorable mentions for four other projects in each category, ranging from development projects in Africa and Bangladesh to an open-source Internet platform and experimental approaches to flood protection.
For more details about the awards, this year’s winners, and the honorable mentions, visit the Zumtobel Group Award Web site.
