The Architectural Review

📣 The AR Emerging issue is here, celebrating the international shortlist of 15 practices shortlisted for the AR Emerging awards 2024! 🎉 The shortlisted practices include A Threshold, Asif Khan Studio (Asif Khan MBE), ATELIER EGR, Bajet Giramé, Civil Architecture (Ali Karimi and Hamed Bukhamseen), Chen Donghua Architects, DECHELETTE ARCHITECTURE, Infraestudio, Material Cultures, New South, NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte Architects, Paradigma Ariadné, Shen Ting Tseng Architects, Superposition, and TYFA. Together, they are investigating earth and bio‑based materials, intervening in threatened landscapes and breathing new life into existing buildings. The issue also marks 25 years of the AR Emerging awards, and brings together past winners and finalists in conversation. Part of the winning inaugural winning team in 1999, Sixten Rahlff of 3RW arkitekter speaks to previous finalists Joshua Bolchover and John Lin; Avenier Cornejo and Carles Oliver Barceló discuss social housing; and Anna Heringer and Nripal Adhikary address the challenges of building at scale with earth. Find out more here: https://lnkd.in/eDB3i7PA 📷 Cover illustration by George Douglas for the AR

We are delighted to announce the 15 practices shortlisted for the AR Emerging awards 2024. This year’s shortlist includes architects experimenting with local and low-carbon materials – such as rammed earth, straw and cork – adding to and preserving existing structures, and creating generous and robust public spaces.   View the full shortlist: https://lnkd.in/eb6vrz4b   The shortlisted practices will meet in London and present their work to our jury, with the winner revealed on Thursday 14 November, at the awards ceremony hosted by partner practice Arup at 80 Charlotte Street, London, W1T 4QS.   This is a unique opportunity to meet the shortlisted architects, connect with industry leaders and honour this year’s winners. Book your free ticket now: https://lnkd.in/eTGQhZw3 Sponsored by: Arup, VMZINC Trophy partner: The New Raw #AREmergingawards

‘In much the same way that the atomic age begins with the dropping of the “Little Boy” bomb on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, so too does a certain kind of atomic architecture,’ Owen Hatherley writes. ‘This has always been carried out in one material: concrete.’ The reason for this can be found in Hiroshima itself. ‘Here, you can count the pre‑1945 buildings in the city centre on one hand,’ Hatherley writes. ‘The bomb destroyed all wooden buildings within a kilometre of the hypocentre. The subsequent fire destroyed nearly all the rest.’ The city’s few concrete buildings, however, were gutted but survived as shells, ‘an exhibition that concrete buildings could survive a nuclear explosion.’ Since then, concrete has become the only material worth considering for nuclear bunkers, power stations, and waste storage facilities. In Spain, a Russian-doll structure of concrete cubes encase the radioactive waste of a nuclear power plant; in the Eniwetok atoll, a concrete dome caps a pit of radioactive debris from 1950s nuclear tests. Read Hatherley’s essay on concrete’s uneasy marriage with the nuclear age:

The Tropical Modernism project’s popular reception calls for a wider study of West African architecture, writes Kuukuwa Manful. ‘To accept that there were no ”formally qualified” West African architects in the 1940s requires a deliberately narrow definition of formal qualification’, Manful writes of the V&A exhibition. ‘The recent, and welcome, focus on modernism in Africa inadvertently reinforces assumptions that there were no African architects before the modernists arrived.’ Read more:

‘The magic of hempcrete starts in the field,’ writes Justinien Tribillon in the Concrete issue. ‘Cannabis sativa is a crop that grows quickly and easily on a variety of grounds, in a diversity of climates, without pesticides and with an impressive capacity to lock up carbon.’ Hempcrete is a relatively young material; it has only been around since the late 1980s and is made from a mixture of hemp shiv, lime and water. ‘The name evokes concrete, of course,’ writes Tribillon. ‘Their mixing techniques and components are quite similar: hempcrete can be projected onto a surface, poured in formwork or cast in block shapes, either on‑site or prefabricated and delivered ready to be used. But the resemblance stops here.’ Read the full essay on hempcrete insulation, and meet the architects fighting to scale up use of this bio-based material in construction:

The W Awards, celebrating exemplary work by women and non-binary people, are back and open for entries! You can enter any category yourself or nominate someone else. Entries close Friday 29 November. Find out more here: https://bit.ly/4fioZsk

As well as a programme of education, the Montessori method offers a number of principles on the architectural design of schools. At the Ngabobo village in northern Tanzania, a new Montessori school designed by APC Architectural Pioneering Consultants and Wolfgang Rossbauer was an ‘opportunity to test them’ writes Ethel-Ruth Tawe. In the building, ‘classrooms blend into each other, limiting the use of doors, and the walls are rotated by 45 degrees towards the sun‘, creating niches and nooks for shelves and books. Ground floor spaces open up to the outdoors and ‘the fenceless campus makes it difficult to distinguish the perimeter of the site – an alignment with both the Maasai’s connection with nature, as well as Montessori principles’ At times, though, the Montessori principles contradict the cultural heritage of the local Maasai population. Constructed from concrete blocks, the building’s ‘sense of permanence seems to conflict with Maasai architectural heritage,’ Tawe writes, while the multistorey volume is ‘unusual in the area’. ‘The Simba Vision school is testament to cross‑cultural experimentation in progress,’ Tawe writes, ‘welcomed by the community but with room for growth.’ Read more:

‘A Department of Energy seems like the sort of agency that should know exactly the amount of, well, energy, it takes to construct a building – and the associated emissions,’ writes Steve Webb in this month’s Outrage. Webb’s ire is directed at a new definition from the US Department of Energy of what constitutes ‘zero-emissions architecture’. Like many similar official definitions, it does not account for embodied carbon emissions, only operational energy use. ‘These definitions seem almost designed to maintain a state of Orwellian doublethink, allowing us to sit happily in our steel, glass and concrete buildings, assured of their environmental impeccability because they have a few solar panels and an air source heat pump.’ Read the full Outrage from the Concrete issue now:

The AR New into Old awards 2025 will open for entries in November. Make sure you’re one of the first to know by registering your interest here: https://bit.ly/3BU8W5H

‘On approaching MAIO’s new social housing scheme, it seems as if Christo and Jeanne‑Claude have given the entire five‑storey structure their trademark fabric wrap treatment,’ writes Ethel Baraona Pohl in the Concrete issue. ‘But what you see are in fact heavy textile curtains, made from the standard PVC‑backed canvas material used for most awnings in Spain. With little maintenance required and a long lifespan, these curtains are one of the low‑cost strategies that the architects have employed to control solar heat gain within the building.’ Take a peek at what Pohl finds behind the curtains, in print or available online now: https://lnkd.in/dpyJGURC