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Wienerberger Brick Award 2020
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Stadsarchief Delft (Photography: Stefan Müller)
Wienerberger Brick Award
Wienerberger presented the biennial Brick Award for the ninth time; this time the Brick Award 2020 edition. A jury consisting of world-class architects assess fifty submissions on criteria such as innovative design, special use of ceramics, functionality and sustainability of projects all over the world. The prize is awarded in five categories: Feeling at Home, Living Together, Working Together, Sharing Public Spaces and Building Outside the box. The last category deals with innovative concepts and ways of using brick, such as new building technologies or special ceramic applications in projects. A total of six prizes will be awarded: in addition to the category prizes, there is also a Grand Prize Winner and a Special Prize Winner.
Five Dutch architects were nominated this year, one of which was awarded: the Delft city archive; a project by Gottlieb Paludan Architects (DK) and Office Winhov (NL). They won the prize in the Working Together category. A city archive has the somewhat contradictory task of protecting valuable documents from outside influences while making them accessible to the public. This new building combines these two functions in the form of an enormous, abstracted bookshelf. The City Archive is divided in two parts: an L-shaped plinth containing the study halls, cafeteria and offices, and above that a closed cube with the archive. In keeping with its public function, the bright concrete base is completely surrounded by story-high window openings. With its bright color, it is reminiscent of the many white-plastered public buildings in the otherwise brick-dominated historic center of Delft.
Katowice, Silesia University’s Radio and TV Department (Photography: Adrià Goula)
With their geometric arrangements, the fully enclosed facades of the archive area make one think of a bookshelf: slender slabs made of prefabricated concrete parts form the ‘shelves’, between which brick pilasters, reminiscent of book spines, protrude at various lenghts.
Sharing Public Spaces
Katowice in Poland was once a fashionable, but at the same time industrial city, surrounded by coal mines, steel mills, foundries and brickworks in front of large boulevards. In the 1940s it was destroyed and the old city streets with many attractive buildings were demolished. Today, the city is known for its culture rather than coal mining. Here, in the Chiaroscuro core of the city, is a magical new building that marries Katowice’s history to the city’s future. A surviving
Maya Somaiya-Library (Photography: Edmund Sumner)
dark brick tenement building has been renovated and wrapped in a screen of bricks sheltering a new university faculty of radio and television. The brick curtain was designed by BAAS Arquitectura (Spain), Grupa 5 architekci (Poland), Maleccy biuro projektowe (Poland) and is made of the same material as the surviving 19th century house, so the building has a consistency of texture. These bricks - burned in Europe’s last coal-fuelled kilns - are nuanced with dark sintering and graduations of color used throughout the building. The project was Grand Prize Winner and Category Winner Sharing Public Spaces.
Maya Somaiya Library
The Maya Somaiya Library is a brand new building for the Shri Sharda English Medium School in Kopargaon, Maharashtra, a state in Western India. Sameep Padora and his studio in Mumbai have made a brick construction in Kopargaon that appears to grow naturally and sinuously from the ground. It rises in fluid form to span a single space library before curving back to the ground again. The complex form of the roof is made and shaped by three layers of shallow - 32 milimeter - brick tiles. Held in compression, these form lightweight vaults proving how adventurous contemporary design can be realized in simple and locally sourced materials.
The compound curves of this structure have been made possible through a Swiss 3D computer modeling process. Designed with the aid of computers and yet hand-crafted, the library treads a fine, calligraphic line between technological wizardry and a sense of what is natural. Maya Somaiya Library was awarded in the Building Outside the Box category.
The Iturbide project
TALLER | Mauricio Rocha + Gabriela Carrillo, (Mexico) ‘Iturbide Studio’-project won the award in the ‘Feeling at Home’ category. Graciela Iturbide is a Mexican photographer. She commissioned her son Mauricio Rocha, who runs the Taller de Arquitectura together with Gabriela Carrillo, with a special building: Her studio was to be erected on an empty lot in the immediate vicinity of the house. Her only condition: It had to be made of brick. The architects built a three-story brick turret that rises out of the fabric of low-rise neighboring buildings. Consisting of three stacked, 28-square-meter rooms, the structure is flanked on the north and south sides by a patio. All rooms open through wall-sized sliding windows to the two courtyards. All of the walls were made of reddish-brown, handmade bricks from a manufacturer in Puebla 150 kilometers away. Thanks to the openwork masonry, a play of light and shadow, which changes with the position of the sun during the day, emerges inside. Thus, the studio is shielded from the outside world without being completely disconnected from it.
Living Together
The Prototype Village House project in Rwanda (Rafi Segal and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Rwanda Workshop Team, USA) was Winner in the Living Together category.. Rwanda is the most densely populated country on the African continent, but at the same time very rural. Outside the urban areas, a sprawl of small houses covers the hilly landscape. Because such peri-urban settlements also require modernization and expansion, a state program to promote village development. To develop an alternative, a team of MIT Africa students headed by Professor Rafi Segal conducted a three-week project in the village of Mageragere. Together with villagers and local laborers, they worked out a prototype for an affordable house which is completely tailored to Rwandan needs. The wall system of the house features a core of panels made of compressed straw fiber combined with 10 x 10 centimeter thick concrete posts. Unlike most Rwandan village houses, it was not clad in sun-dried bricks, but with longer-lasting red ones.
Can Jaime I n’Isabelle
With the Can Jaime I n’Isabelle project, the architects of TEd’A arquitectes (Spain) have created a contemporary interpretation of the traditional courtyard houses of Mallorca. It’s built upon a square, without having to strictly and dogmatically follow geometry. Sealed off from the outside for the most part, the classic courtyard houses reveal a variety of spaces, paths, plants, closed, open, and covered places: arcades, porches, terraces. TEd’A arquitectes also use this type to fit the house into the landscape: Stones of the property are integrated in the outer concrete walls; with the green roofs, the house becomes a part of the cultural landscape that is carried forward with it. Can Jaime I n’Isabelle was special prize winner in the category Feeling at Home.
Wienerberger Brick Award winners>
Ground mussel shells for 3D printing
Marita Sauerwein used a 3D printer to create a vase and a hair clip made from ground mussel shells, with sugar and alginate as binding agents. With these prototypes she shows that 3D printing and reprinting using locally sourced sustainable and natural raw materials is a viable option in a circular economy. This does however call for a different approach in the design process. She was awarded her PhD at TU Delft on Wednesday 14 October.
20 million kilos of raw materials
Mussel shells are abundantly available in the Netherlands. For instance, very year, 55 million kilos of mussels are harvested here, resulting in 20 million kilos of waste. What if you could put that mountain of waste material to good use, and even reuse it? To investigate the possibility of using these types of new materials in 3D printing, Sauerwein experimented with materials, designed prototypes and actually produced them.
Dissolve and re-print
One of the key requirements for practical use in a circular economy is that it must be possible to deconstruct and reassemble the materials used without deterioration of quality. In this case, the prototypes can simply be dissolved in water to form a paste, which can then be reused in the 3D printer without any loss of quality. The most important finding of Sauerwein for this was the binding agent. The compounds made with the mussel shells and alginate are fully reversible, making them suitable for reuse in another product design without quality loss. Also, products printed with alginate can be bend after submersion in water, which offers new possibilities, for example, to make a precisely fitting hair clip. According to the doctoral candidate, the development of re-printable materials calls for a different approach to design and a different perspective on the life cycle of a product. You have to think about how products and material can be reused without losing quality as soon as you start designing.
Text: TU Delft>
More reading: What can mussel shells teach us about the circular-economy?>
The article ‘Additive Manufacturing for Design in a Circular Economy’ is online>
Marine sponges inspire next generation of construction
Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) are using the glassy skeletons of marine sponges as inspiration for the next generation of stronger and taller buildings, longer bridges, and lighter spacecraft. In a new paper published in Nature Materials, they showed that the diagonally-reinforced square lattice-like skeletal structure of Euplectella aspergillum, a deep-water marine sponge, has a higher strength-toweight ratio than the traditional lattice designs that have used for centuries in the construction of buildings and bridges. They found the sponge’s diagonal reinforcement strategy achieves the highest buckling resistance for a given amount of material, which indicates that stronger and more resilient structures can be build by intelligently rearranging existing material within the structure. In other words: this biologically-inspired geometry could provide a roadmap for designing lighter, stronger structures for a wide range of applications. The use of diagonal lattice architectures, that uses many small, closely spaced diagonal beams to evenly distribute applied loads, was patented in the early 1800s by the architect and civil engineer, Ithiel Town, who wanted a method to make sturdy bridges out of lightweight and
Euplectella aspergillum
cheap materials. Town’s method certainly is cost-effective and functional, but not optimized. Could bioinspired architecture pave the way for stronger, lighter structures?
Venus Flower basket
Euplectella aspergillum, also called ‘Venus flower basket’, employs two sets of parallel diagonal skeletal struts, which intersect over and are fused to an underlying square grid, to form a robust checkerboard-like pattern. In simulations and experiments, the researchers replicated this design and compared the sponge’s skeletal architecture to existing lattice geometries. The sponge design outperformed them all, withstanding heavier loads without buckling. The researchers showed that the paired parallel crossed-diagonal structure improved overall structural strength by more than 20 percent, without the need to add additional material to achieve this effect.
The Harvard Office of Technology Development has protected the intellectual property relating to this project and is exploring commercialization opportunities.
Credits: The article was published by Nature Materials, titled ‘Mechanically robust lattices inspired by deep-sea glass sponges’ and written by Matheus C. Fernandes, Joanna Aizenberg, James C. Weaver & Katia Bertoldi, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
More at Harvard>
