The winners of the Tall Building Awards, organized by the CTBUH (Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat) have already been announced. The competition attracted in its latest edition132 entries, among which a winner was selected by continent.
The spirit of the CTBUH competition is to reward the tall building which provides the greatest environmental quality and better habitability for their users, rather than the height itself. The jury considered that the buildings that fitted this purposes the most in its configuration are:
 
- Shanghai Tower by Gensler.- Best Tall Building Asia & Australasia Winner.
- Via 57 West by
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).- Best Tall Building Americas Winner.
- The White Walls by
Jean Nouvel.- Best Tall Building Europe Winner.
- The Cube by Orange Architects.- Best Tall Building Middle East & Africa Winner.

VIA 57 WEST.- Best Tall Building Americas Winner
Via 57 West, by Bjarke Ingels Group, accomplishes the ambitious goal of forging an entirely new high-rise typology. Coined by the architect as a “courtscraper,” the tower is a hybrid between the European perimeter block and the traditional Manhattan high-rise, while combining the advantages of both. It has the compactness, density, and intimacy of a classic courtyard building with the grandeur, airiness, and expansive views of a skyscraper. The building offers a unique vision for the future of the tall building; one that manages to synthesize high-quality and visually appealing architecture with the needs of the client, all without sacrificing environmental performance or residential quality.

SHANGHAI TOWER.- Best Tall Building Asia & Australasia Winner
Shanghai Tower, by Gensler, embodies a new prototype for tall buildings. Placed in close proximity to Jin Mao Tower and Shanghai World Financial Center, the tower rises high above the skyline, its curved façade and spiraling form symbolizing the dynamic emergence of modern China. But its twisting form goes beyond just creating a unique appearance; wind tunnel tests confirm a 24 percent savings in structural wind loading when compared to a rectangular building of the same height. The tower’s program is organized into nine vertical zones. Each of these vertical neighborhoods rise from a sky lobby, a light-filled garden atrium that creates a sense of community and supports daily life with a varied program catering to tenants and visitors.

THE WHITE WALLS.- Best Tall Building Europe Winner
The White Walls, by Jean Nouvel, has single-handedly transformed the urban silhouette of Nicosia, the capital of Cyprus, drawing upon its context to deliver a residential-office tower that is unmistakably Mediterranean, yet global influential with its highly successful environmental considerations. The mass of the tower’s white concrete walls is negated by numerous square perforations, from which an assortment of hanging vegetation protrudes. Abundant greenery is also present on its southern balconies, with native plants covering nearly 80 percent of the façade area. The resulting coverage serves to trap carbon dioxide, emit oxygen, and provide energy-saving shade.

THE CUBE.- Best Tall Building Middle East & Africa Winner
The Cube, employs a residential design concept that is simple yet extraordinarily effective, rotating and displacing volumes on each floor to offer residents unique outdoor areas and panoramic views of Beirut. The design stacks 14 rotated floor plans on top of a lobby, generating 21 apartments with fluid spaces, large balconies, and wall-to-wall window frames. The structure is unique for utilizing Self-Consolidating Concrete, allowing loads to be directed to four areas of rotated girders on every floor, with no additional structural slabs added to the façades.
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Bjarke Ingels (born in Copenhagen, 1974) studied architecture at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen and at the School of Architecture of Barcelona, ​​obtaining his degree as an architect in 1998. He is the founder of the BIG architecture studio - (Bjarke Ingels Group), studio founded in 2005, after co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001 with his former partner Julien de Smedt, whom he met while working at the prestigious OMA studio in Rotterdam.

Bjarke has designed and completed award-winning buildings worldwide, and currently his studio is based with venues in Copenhagen and New York. His projects include The Mountain, a residential complex in Copenhagen, and the innovative Danish Maritime Museum in Elsinore.

With the PLOT study, he won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2004, and with BIG he has received numerous awards such as the ULI Award for Excellence in 2009. Other prizes are the Culture Prize of the Crown Prince of Denmark in 2011; and Along with his architectural practice, Bjarke has taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University and Rice University and is an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen.

In 2018, Bjarke received the Knight's Cross of the Order of Dannebrog granted by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II. He is a frequent public speaker and continues to give lectures at places such as TED, WIRED, AMCHAM, 10 Downing Street or the World Economic Forum. In 2018, Bjarke was appointed Chief Architectural Advisor by WeWork to advise and develop the design vision and language of the company for buildings, campuses and neighborhoods around the world.

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Jean Nouvel, (born August 12, 1945) is a French architect. Nouvel studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and was a founding member of Mars 1976 and Syndicat de l'Architecture. He has obtained a number of prestigious distinctions over the course of his career, including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (technically, the prize was awarded for the Institut du Monde Arabe which Nouvel designed), the Wolf Prize in Arts in 2005 and the Pritzker Prize in 2008.

Nouvel was awarded the Pritzker Prize, architecture's highest honour, in 2008, for his work on more than 200 projects, among them, in the words of The New York Times, the "exotically louvered" Arab World Institute, the bullet-shaped and "candy-colored" Torre Agbar in Barcelona, the "muscular" Guthrie Theater with its cantilevered bridge in Minneapolis, and in Paris, the "defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric" Musée du quai Branly (2006) and the Philharmonie de Paris (a "trip into the unknown" c. 2012).

Pritzker points to several more major works: in Europe, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art (1994), the Culture and Convention Center in Lucerne (2000), the Opéra Nouvel in Lyon (1993) , Expo 2002 in Switzerland and, under construction, the Copenhagen Concert Hall and the courthouse in Nantes (2000); as well as two tall towers in planning in North America, Tour Verre in New York City and a cancelled condominium tower in Los Angeles. International cultural projects such as the Abu Dhabi Louvre, the Philharmonic Hall in Paris, the Qatar National Museum in Doha, or the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2010 in London.

In its citation, the jury of the Pritzker prize noted:

Of the many phrases that might be used to describe the career of architect Jean Nouvel, foremost are those that emphasize his courageous pursuit of new ideas and his challenge of accepted norms in order to stretch the boundaries of the field. [...] The jury acknowledged the ‘persistence, imagination, exuberance, and, above all, an insatiable urge for creative experimentation’ as qualities abundant in Nouvel’s work.

Among his principal completed projects, we find the Arab World Institute in Paris, the Cartier Foundation and the Quai Branly museum in Paris, the Culture and Congress Center KKL in Lucerne, the extension of the Queen Sofia Arts Center in Madrid, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, the Philharmonic of Paris…
 
Among the projects currently under studies or under construction: the “53W53, Tour de Verre” integrating the extension of the MoMA galleries in New York, the residential towers “Le Nouvel” in Kuala Lumpur, “Anderson 18” and “Ardmore” in Singapore and “Rosewood” in São Paulo, the office towers “Hekla” and “Duo” in Paris, the cultural complex “The Artists’ Garden” in Qingdao or the National Art Museum of China NAMOC in Beijing… The design of the Louvre Abu Dhabi began in 2006 with Jean Nouvel’s Partner Architect Hala Wardé.
 

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