From over five thousand entries by applicants around the world, two projects from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design community are among the 2018 Global LafargeHolcim Awards’ six winners. The winning projects by Loreta Castro Reguera (MAUD ’10) and Stefano Romagnoli (MLA ’19) both propose interdisciplinary approaches to infrastructure around water.
Administered by Switzerland-based LafargeHolcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, the international LafargeHolcim Awards recognize exemplary sustainable construction projects and visions, irrespective of scale. Winners of the Global LafargeHolcim Awards are selected from among a pool of Gold, Silver, or Bronze awardees in each of five regional competitions: Middle East Africa, Europe, Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific. Fifty-five projects qualified for 2018 Global Awards. The 2018 Global LafargeHoclim Awards jury was headed by Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena.
Loreta Castro Reguera and Manuel Perló Cohen at a Latin America region prize ceremony.
The competition’s top prize went to Reguera’s project “Hydropuncture in Mexico,” a collaboration between Reguera and colleague Manuel Perló Cohen of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Their design for a publicly-accessible water retention and treatment complex in Mexico City previously won the Gold prize at the Latin America region LafargeHolcim awards. (Read about other GSD winners of the 2017 LafargeHoclim regional awards.)
Aravena called the proposal “compelling and appealing” for its scalable solution to a global problem. “The beauty of the project is that it’s able to integrate more than one dimension—it’s not just the technical infrastructure problem of water, it is also about public space,” said Aravena in a video on the project. “It has capacity to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods that desperately need it.”
Current Master in Landscape Architecture candidate Stefano Romagnoli and co-authors received one of three “Ideas Prize” for their project “Territorial Figure in Argentina: Tidal energy landscape.” The design proposes an infrastructure for the use of tidal energy in the Río Gallegos estuary. The team previously received a “Next Generation” first prize at the Latin America regional awards. (An exhibition of Romagnoli’s work related to energy landscapes was displayed on the Dean’s Wall last fall).
The Global LafargeHoclim Awards Jury consisted of Alejandro Aravena (head of jury), David Adjaye, Xuemei Bai, Hashim Sarkis (MArch ’89, PhD ’95), Stuart Smith, Werner Sobek, Rolf Soiron, Brinda Somaya, and Marc Angélil.
This is the fifth International LafargeHolcim Awards competition. Submissions for the next round of awards will open in mid-2019.
