The future of architecture: meet the RA Dorfman Prize 2024 nominees
By Hugh Pearman
Published on 14 October 2024
Meet the four nominees for this year’s RA Dorfman Prize, which celebrates international architects reimagining the future of architecture.
From the Autumn 2024 issue of RA Magazine, issued quarterly to Friends of the RA.
Construct hope
Livyj Bereh (‘Left Bank’) is a Ukrainian volunteer-run organisation that records and repairs war-damaged buildings, mainly homes and schools in rural villages that have been devastated by the war provoked by Russia’s invasion. In parallel with this, they assist the military effort by delivering vehicles, food supplies and munitions to parts of Ukraine where fighting is taking place. Collective action, they say, is imperative at times of crisis.
Their building work is not yet a matter of planning for postwar reconstruction. It is more immediate and direct than that. Livyj Bereh began by fixing the roofs of hundreds of homes damaged or destroyed by enemy action, making them habitable again. Repairing war-damaged schools provides a strong inducement for families to return.
The organisation has also designed exhibitions around the world, drawing attention to their work of basic reconstruction in often desperate circumstances. There is another side: recording and archiving the architectural and human character of these devastated settlements with a view to eventual peace and a return to everyday life.
Livyj Bereh, Ukraine 2022/23
Livyj Bereh, Ukraine 2022/23
Livyj Bereh, Ukraine 2022/23
Livyj Bereh, Ukraine 2022/23
Collaborate as a collective
Working predominantly in Switzerland and the Balkans, and influenced by the modernist tradition, the practice TEN Studio subverts convention through its organisational structure. TEN works informally as a 20-strong, no-boss collective with individuals and groups coming together as and when. A young practice, they liken their approach to that of a record label.
Some of their work deploys advanced engineering, such as the design for a tower in Bern which is a minimal concrete structure interleaved with three-storey cassettes of prefabricated timber floors. Another project combines traditional stonework with a lightweight support structure in the earthquake-hit Thame Valley in Nepal.
A co-living home for five women in Bosnia and Herzegovina is an exercise in community architecture, involving a vividly coloured and textured façade designed in collaboration with Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi and made by local automotive panel beaters. This building sets the tone for a number of their explorations into affordable shared housing. TEN is adept not only at turning its research into real projects but also broadly disseminating the results through teaching, books, films and online platforms.
A House for Five Women, Gradacac, Bosnia, 2021.
A House for Five Women, Gradacac, Bosnia, TEN, 2021
500-Year Tower, Bern, Switzerland, 2021
Avala House by TEN Studio
Rediscover ancient techniques
Architect and social anthropologist Salima Naji has spent two decades in the south of her native Morocco, specialising in the restoration of oasis communities in the sub-Saharan Atlas Mountains. This has involved the rediscovery and reapplication of ancient building practices, using local materials and passive ventilation and cooling techniques. Such ways of designing and building, she says, are vital at a time of climate heating and the stresses that brings to ancient communities.
This can be a delicate business, given the need to unlearn some less suitable modern technologies. Naji has become adept at working directly with the communities of sometimes near-abandoned settlements. She helps them to start the process of restoration with their own hands, in stone, timber and bricks of mud and straw, establishing public spaces as well as individual buildings. With its structure of locally abundant stone, a cultural centre Naji designed for the remote village of Ait Ouabelli has a desert-fortress quality; slatted screens, produced from the timber of palm and laurel trees, help to regulate light and temperature. Since 2017, she has managed the post-earthquake reconstruction of the historic fortress in Agadir, an enormous challenge.
Amtoudi, Morocco, April 9, 2022
Kasbah Agadir Oufella, Salima Naji
Citadelle d'Agadir Kasbah Salima Naji
Taghjijt, Morocco; Salima Naji
Demolish nothing
Perhaps the most openly ideological of the practices on this year’s shortlist, b+ architects see adapting existing buildings as a real alternative to the finance-driven, environmentally destructive cycle of perpetual demolition and rebuilding. The Berlin-based team takes on projects – real or speculative – which reimagine and reuse what exists, often buildings of the postwar concrete kind routinely rejected as worthless by property developers.
Their ‘Antivilla’, in the former German Democratic Republic, south-west of Berlin, is a derelict former lingerie factory transformed into a studio and home for b+ founder Arno Brandluber. He has knocked large, deliberately rough holes through it to create windows, added an exaggerated corner spout to drain the roof, and retained the industrial character inside.
A collaborative firm with a raw, minimalist aesthetic, b+ aims to “reveal and activate the latent potentials within” existing buildings. Architects alone can’t achieve what needs to be done, they say: everyone involved in the built environment can be allies.
Antivilla, Krampnitz, Germany: b+ 2010-15
Antivilla, Krampnitz, Germany: b+ 2010-15
Brunnenstraße 9, Berlin, Germany: b+ 2007-10
Hugh Pearman is Chair of the Twentieth Century Society. His latest book is About Architecture: An Essential Guide in 55 Buildings (Yale).
The RA Dorfman Prize Ceremony takes place on 31 October.
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