MCHAP Announces Nominated Works for Second Biennial Prize

John Hill

14. March 2016

A dozen of the MCHAP Nominated Works

Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) College of Architecture Dean Wiel Arets and Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) Director Dirk Denison have announced the MCHAP 2014/15 nominees and jury.

MCHAP was launched in 2014 to "recognize the most distinguished architectural works built in North and South America." The inaugural prizes were given to Álvaro Siza's Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and Herzog & de Meuron's 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, Florida, with the MCHAP for Emerging Architecture given to Pezo von Ellrichshausen for their Poli House in Tome, Chile.

The nominated works for the second biennial MCHAP and MCHAP.emerge prizes had to be realized between January 2014 and December 2015 and were put forward by 95 nominators from throughout the Americas. The MCHAP.emerge winner will be announced at the MCHAP.emerge Symposium taking place at IIT on 1 April 2016. Finalists for the MCHAP will be announced in late June, with the winner crowned on 19 October 2016 at another symposium at IIT.

IIT's announcement of the finalists also included the names of the jury, who held their first session in early March when the nominated works were displayed at the school: Jury President Stan Allen, architect and former Dean of Princeton University’s School of Architecture (New York); Florencia Rodriguez, editorial director of Piedra, Papel y Tijera publishers (Buenos Aires); Ila Berman, Professor of Architecture, University of Waterloo (Waterloo); Jean Pierre Crousse of Barclay & Crousse (Lima), and Dean Wiel Arets (Amsterdam).

Accompanying the announcement of the finalists and the jury is news of a third MCHAP prize: MCHAP.student, which functions much like the recently announced Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA) but with a logical focus on the Americas: "MCHAP is inviting a network of schools from throughout the Americas to submit the most outstanding project by a 2015/2016 graduating student that addresses the metropolis through an architectural proposal." The winning student will be announced in October.

To see the list of MCHAP nominated works – and it's a long list – visit the IIT/MCHAP website. A selection of a dozen works by World-Architects member firms is highlighted below.