5 Finalists for EU Mies Award

The naming of the finalists is the third step in the process of determining the Prize Winner and the Emerging Architect Winner, which will be announced in Brussels on 16 May 2017. Today's announcement follows the release of the 355 nominated works in December and the naming of 40 shortlisted projects in late January.

The seven-person jury for the 2017 award cycle consists of Stephen Bates, Gonçalo Byrne, Pelin Derviş, Dominique Jakob, Juulia Kauste, Małgorzata Omilanowska, and Peter Cachola Schmal. Bates, chairman of the jury, said about the finalists in a statement released today: "Our instincts could be summed up by the words of Peter Smithson: 'things need to be ordinary and heroic at the same time’. We were looking for an ordinariness whose understated lyricism is full of potential'." 

The five finalist works will be presented tomorrow at the Future Architecture Platform Conference in Ljubljana. Following that, the jury will visit the five buildings to determine the Prize Winner. As a bonus to the public, the five finalist works and the Emerging Architect project will be open to the public from 20 to 28 May. The award ceremony will take place at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona on 26 May.

Read about the five finalists below (listed in alphabetical order by project name) and click on the links to visit the Miesarch website and study the projects in more depth.

NL Architects and XVW architectuur
deFlatKleiburg
Amsterdam, Netherlands
"De Flat is an innovative renovation of one of the biggest apartment buildings in the NL called Kleiburg, a bend slab with 500 apartments, 400 meter long, 10 + 1 stories high. Consortium De FLAT rescued the building from the wracking ball by turning it into a Klusflat meaning that the inhabitants renovate their apartments by themselves."

Alison Brooks Architects
Ely Court
London, England
"Ely Court is a 44 dwelling residential development within the South Kilburn Estate Regeneration Masterplan in the London Borough of Brent. Ely Court forms part of Phase 1 of the Regeneration Programme. The scheme delivers a mixture of single and double storey dwellings with 40% made available to existing South Kilburn Estate social tenants."

Lundgaard & Tranberg Architects
Kannikegården
Ribe, Denmark
"Kannikegården in Ribe, Denmark’s best preserved medieval city, is on the main square, just across the city cathedral. The simple brick clad volume hovers above the city floor to expose an open ground floor with a 1000-year-old brick ruin integrated within. The ruin as well as the modern cladding convey stories of cultural and historical heritage."

BBGK Architekci
Katyn Museum
Warsaw, Poland
"Katyn Museum is there to commemorate a painful episode of Polish history which took place during the World War II when over a twenty thousands of Polish military officers and state officials were brutally murdered by the Soviet Secret Police."

Rudy Ricciotti
Rivesaltes Memorial Museum
Rivesaltes/Ribesaltes, France
"The Rivesaltes Memorial – Neither oblivion nor forgiveness. We cannot remain detached from the history of Camp Joffre through a discourse that is indifferent to the human drama that unfolded on this very site. The memorial is silent and ponderous. It is there to take the hits instead of others. For absentees. It must be something that embodies the responsibility of the memory."