Whether reimagining what mixed-use developments or adaptive reuse can look like, utilizing outdoor spaces to enhance indoor experiences, or creating something new that honors the flavor of the neighborhood it inhabits, the 2024 Architecture & Interiors Award winners prove that beauty and function are never mutually exclusive.
A jury of three notable voices in design: Ben Crawford of Omniplan, Dallas, John Frane of HGA, Los Angeles, and Brooke Horan of HDR, New York, were moderated by Paul Makovsky as they selected an eclectic slate of honorees to represent “a diverse range of commercial architecture and interior design projects showcasing innovation and ingenuity in all its forms” for Architect Magazine.
There were 34 awards in all: 11 projects won Honors awards and another 23 received Merit awards. The projects spanned the globe from the Honor award for the Kempegowda International Airport in Bengaluru, India to the mixed use project Die Macherie in Munich, Germany, from striking interior staircase Special Entry, FIXTURE Award honoree in New York City to the Theatre de Verdure in Montreal, and the astonishing use of indoor space by Honor award winner, the Neil Campbell Rowing Center, also in Canada (Ontario), the breadth and depth of talented architects, designers, engineers, and the developers and general contractors who executed their designs is apparent.
Below, you’ll find a quick overview of some of the winners and why they stood out among the thousands of new projects developed each year.
Kempegowda International Airport Terminal 2: Biophilic Design
The fantastical sense of whimsy captured in Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s design for Terminal 2 at the airport in Bengaluru evokes “a calming oasis for travelers… as well as a nod to Bengaluru’s reputation as the ‘garden city,’” with its use of biophilic design, developed with landscape architect Grant Associates, that includes “massive living walls and meandering paths to gardens of hanging planters” and even indoor waterfalls that serve to cool temperatures while providing meditative focal points.
The central design element of cross-laid, engineered bamboo adorns ceilings, covers structural elements, and is even used to clad the two-story pavilions on the site, evoking traditional Indian cane.
The execution of the award-winning design was Rs 5,000 crore ($595.986 million USD) sustainable project, completed in 2023, with general contractor Larson & Toubro bringing it to reality. The terminal also won the Indian Green Building Council Platinum Certification and is the largest terminal in the world to receive pre-certification as LEED Platinum by the USGBC.
What Is Biophilic Design?
Biophilic design provides the opportunity for people and nature to comingle in commercial spaces – bringing nature indoors, if you will – to promote looking beyond the human experience to focus on people’s place in the natural scheme of things.
Arts & Letters Creative Co.: Honoring the Past While Creating a Modern Space with Adaptive Reuse
When you are adapting a historic building, especially converting a manufacturing site into an open-plan, collaborative space, striking the perfect balance between old and new while providing the modern infrastructure, MEP features, and functional elements required for a modern business can be a very heavy lift. However, ARCHITECTUREFIRM, partnering with AFK Group, Engineering Solutions, and GC DPR Construction made the very difficult project look easy.
The design makes the most of the natural light by preserving the industrial window design and adding skylights, and the exterior honors the building’s past – as a Lucky Strike Tobacco power plant, dating to the 1930s. By incorporating exposed beams and ceiling fans, white walls, and light wood details, the designers made the most of the industrial brick walls and steel structural elements to create an inviting space that allows creative juices to flow.
The 20,400 s.f. adaptive reuse project was completed in 2021 with a final cost of $3,822800 and houses the creative firm, Arts & Letters Creative Co.’s 160-person team.
Die Macherie: A Mixed-Use Neighborhood Full of Surprises
Multiple architectural firms collaborated to create Europe’s first LEED-GOLD neighborhood that includes a 10-story hotel, coworking spaces, retail shops, restaurants & entertainment, and offices that completely transformed a barren industrial tract into a “vibrant, emotionally engaging community.”
The design brainchild of HWKN Architecture, OSA, m3 Architekten, and Holger Meyer Architektur broke ground in 2019 with Dibauco as the general contractor, hired to bring to life 18,580.6 square meters of mixed-use space. The cost is confidential, but with so much unique development over some 200,000 s.f., its completion in 2022 had to have cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
The buildings share some common themes, like the brickwork exteriors that pay tribute to Munich’s brick-making past. Each structure has its own unique personality; none more so than the Scandic Munchen Macherie hotel that towers above the neighborhood layout that includes three “pedestrian canyons” clad in orange brick. The hotel’s façade feels like the building itself is in mid-motion, like a Rubic’s Cube that’s about to click into place at any second.
What is LEED Certification?
LEED stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design. The certification levels provide the most globally recognized rating system for green construction with over 197,000 projects throughout 186 countries and territories, and more than 29 billion square feet of buildings.
A LEED certification is a “globally recognized symbol of sustainability achievement and leadership.”
There are four LEED certification levels: from Certified (green), through Silver, Gold, and Platinum. These levels are earned by adhering to strict sustainable construction standards that factor in carbon footprint, energy, water use, waste, and transportation, among others. A project can be LEED certified in almost any sector:
- Building Design and Construction (BD+C)
- Interior Design and Construction (ID+C)
- Building Operations and Maintenance (O+M)
- Neighborhood Development (ND)
- Homes
- Cities
Each of the 34 winners has a unique perspective on architecture and design, with many integrating structural design, interior design, and landscape design and engineering to create a seamless, holistic space.
You can view the full slate of winners, here.
The massive collaborative effort required to develop and realize such complex builds is testament to the individual talents of the architects, engineers, designers, and contractors involved, and also to the obvious emphasis put on pre-planning. Because without an intricate and precise pre-construction plan, that includes clash detection, exacting existing conditions documentation, and construction progress capture, any of these award-winning projects could have failed.
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