The XIV BEAU focuses its attention on the most daily architecture

The projects take a tour of some of the best achievements in this post-crisis period, which denotes a slow and difficult exit with promising and excellent proposals. It is especially attractive that the jury, finally, has paid attention to those less grandiloquent interventions of architecture and urbanism.

The city claimed a different way of building itself. The new forms and strategies have been showing that at different scales another urbanism is possible, an urbanism that dialogues with the citizens, with the inhabitants, without excluding them and bringing closer the former impositions of urban planning. As an example of a large urban scale, the award-winning development of Ponteareas, in Pontevedra, projected by the MMASA study, or the sensitive recovery intervention of the Jardin Niel, by Miquel Batlle and Michele Orliac in Toulouse, or the "street-plaza" proposed by Bosch Capdeferro connecting the Carmel district of Barcelona with the nearby neighborhoods.

Directed by the Sevillian architects José Morales and Sara de Giles, this Biennial has focused on the most daily architecture, on that which recovers and rehabilitates the existing, with criteria of sustainability. Among the recovery proposals that we liked the most is the recovery project of the old light bulb factory in Katowice, in the south of Poland, carried out by the team led by Jordi Badía, who, against the criterion of the contest rules, proposing its demolition, projected the recovery and rehabilitation of the structure.

At the Silesian University school, TV Radio Katowice, named after one of the most international film directors in Poland, Krystof Kiéslowski, known for his trilogy of colors Blue, White and Red, Jordi Badía and the team, used the ceramics and brick as key elements to define the project, especially the exterior facade, very neutral, getting dialogue with its urban neighbors and whose repetition generates a brilliant intervention in interiors and backyards. Continuing with the attention to the patios and the corners to the small one is the citizens center that Oscar Miguel Ares projected in Greater Village of San Martin (Valladolid).

The work of the Seville Antonio Ortiz and Antonio Cruz has been recognized not in the new Wanda Metropolitan Stadium (a work that deserved it), but with the Offices for regional government of Andalusia in Seville, the idea of building a continuous city, and not the icons that also identify it, points out the attention put by the jury of the biennial, which acknowledged finalist works as the Building Caixaforum Sevilla, Guillermo Vázquez Consuegra, and however, were not awarded.

If the prizes have been characterized by paying attention to the smallest works, they have also been addressed by the call for attention to intelligence in projects developed by the administration, where sustainable criteria are applied, such as the materials and criteria followed for the construction of the social housing Life Reusing Posidonia in Formentera designed by Carles Oliver, Antonio Martín, Joaquín Moyá and Alfonso Reina. Intelligence in the use of materials that can also be seen in projects with energy certification A such as the houses of Cork de López Rivera in Llafranch.

Sustainability was raised from the outset in the face of environmentalism, as the ability to recover and maintain the memory of citizens dialoguing with nature, especially when the heritage of modern architecture is being destroyed at an alarming rate, Here is the recognition of a brilliant architect like Ramón Vázquez Molezún who built a house in 1967 on the ruins of a salting factory in Bueu (Pontevedra), a restoration that has been possible thanks to crowdfunding.

A third aspect has been the internationalization of Spanish architecture, the aforementioned project of Jordi Badía has swelled a very high percentage of awards made and awarded outside our borders, as Miquel Batlle and Michele Orliac, with his project in Jardin Niel, in Toulouse, the Historical Archive of the State of Oaxaca in Mexico by Ignacio Mendaro Corsini, the excellent School in Orsonnens of TEd'A or projects by IDOM such as the extension for the Alioune Diop University in Diourbel, in Senegal.

The need to recover, as the intervention in the access to the Jorba Castle and the generation of an aesthetic that arises from the need have been the pillars that point out lines shown in this edition of the BEAU with which the future of architecture has new horizons and future.

THE AWARDS

In this edition, the jury has awarded 23 national and international works in the Panorama of Works section. The list of winners combines projects of landscape and public space, with rehabilitation works, public facilities and residential buildings.

THE PROJECTS AWARDED IN PANORAMA DE OBRAS:

OTHER CATEGORIES

You can check the name of the awarded projects and their authors in these links:

II SAMPLE OF RESEARCH (42 awarded projects)

https://tinyurl.com/XIVBEAUInvestiga 

VII SAMPLE END OF CAREER PROJECT (20 awarded projects)

https://tinyurl.com/XIVBEAUPFC