IEN Consultants was honoured to serve on jury of the Holcim Awards 2023 jury for sustainable construction and had the pleasure to attend the award ceremony on 18 November 2023, Venice, where award winners from all over the World shared the prize money of USD1million. Watch their joyous cheer below:
The Holcim Awards recognize and promote projects that combine sustainable design and sustainable construction with architectural excellence. For the Holcim Awards 2023, the 5 Gold Winning projects were from China, Spain, Mexico, Ghana and Canada, respectively:
For more information including about the Silver, Bronze and Acknowledgement prize winners, go to the official website: https://www.holcimfoundation.org/awards-2023
For this round of the Holcim Wards, almost 2,400 registrations of interest were received from 114 countries. The Holcim Awards 2023 winners were chosen from 500 submissions that met the eligibility criteria of the project not having started construction before January 1, 2022, but the project had to be client-supported, aka commissioned by a client for the purpose of real-world execution. Eligible projects could be in the detailed design stage, completed design, under construction, or having completed construction. Lastly, the submissions had to include detailed sustainability data for the project, as all entries were evaluated using the the Holcim Foundation’s goals for sustainable construction (Uplifting places, a Healthy planet, Viable economics, and Thriving communities):
The above four goals are not enough to drive industry transformation. Hence, the Holcim Awards 2023 were also evaluated according to the three guiding principles below:
These guiding principles are deemed critical to achieving Holcim's vision for a sustainable built environment.
Independent Holcim Awards 2023 juries were formed in each of the five geographic regions:
Asia Pacific
Europe
Latin America
Middle East & Africa
North America
Each region would share prize money of USD200,000 allocated as:
USD100,000 | Gold winner
USD60,000 | Silver winner
USD30,000 | Bronze winner
USD10,000 | Acknowledgement
Gregers (IEN Consultants) was a member of the jury for the Asia Pacific Region, which consisted of nine members and was tasked by evaluating 119 projects for the Holcim Awards 2023. The jury chair, Manit Rastogi, did an excellent job of facilitating the evaluation process in a systematic, fair and time efficient way, which allowed for discussion and deliberation between the jury members where necessary.
Each juror would evaluate all the projects on their own time and would enter their scoring in a shared spreadsheet, which formed a basis for the jury deliberation, with a priority given to hearing opposing views, aka the person giving the lows scoring and the person giving the highest scoring for the short-listed projects. It was a real pleasure to work with the jury members, who were Manit Rastogi (jury chair, or jury facilitator, as he preferred to be called), Maria Atkinson, Sarah Ichioka, Nilesh Jadhav, Wolfgang Kessling, Gregers Reimann, Zoe Sibala, Daliana Surawinata and Kongjian Yu. We determined the four winning projects for the Asia Pacific region to be:
Direct project links:
Gold winner | Fujian Tulou in China
Silver winner | Ger Plug-In 3.0 in Mongolia
Bronze winner | NUS Yusof Ishak House in Singapore
Acknowledgement | Post-Covid Factory in Vietnam
Congratulations!
The whole 1-hour Holcim Awards 2023 ceremony can be viewed here:
And the 1-hour Holcim Awards 2023 panel discussions can be watch here:
In addition to reviewing the many interesting and inspiring projects for the Holcim Awards, it was also a pleasure to meet so many new people in the field of sustainable construction at the award ceremony itself - both the award winners as well as the members from the five juries from across the World. The Holcim Foundation must be commended for this excellent initiative of the Holcim Wards for sustainable construction, an initiative dating back to 2005. In fact, all the past Holcim Ward winning projects are available online on this link: https://www.holcimfoundation.org/awards/awards-history
Lastly, below are a few photos from the Holcim Awards 2023 ceremony held at the Biennale in Venice, Italy, 18-19 November 2023:
