The Architectural Review #1516

AR November 2024: 25 years of AR Emerging

4 November 2024 By Manon Mollard, Eleanor Beaumont and Kristina Rapacki Editorials

A Threshold | Superposition | Civil Architecture | NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte | Déchelette Architecture | TYFA | Infraestudio | Asif Khan Studio | Bajet Giramé | New South | Paradigma Ariadné | Chen Donghua Architects | Material Cultures | Atelier EGR | Shen Ting Tseng Architects

Architecture is a site of exchange, involving countless conversations between architects as well as an ecosystem of clients, craftspeople, builders, manufacturers and more. Sharing knowledge and experience across geographies and generations is central to the AR Emerging awards, which launched 25 years ago and grant early recognition to young architects around the world. Today, each edition brings together judges and finalists in productive in-person dialogue before an overall winner is chosen.

To celebrate a quarter-century of the AR Emerging awards, this issue features past finalists in conversation. The winner of the awards’ inaugural edition in 1999, Sixten Rahlff, speaks to John Lin and Joshua Bolchover about building in rural contexts in the global south. Rahlff’s winning project, designed while he was still a student, taught him the fundamentals of architecture, he says: ‘There are people, there are materials and there is the climate’. Carles Oliver Barceló, Christelle Avenier and Miguel Cornejo, meanwhile, discuss the power of architects to shift to ecological building systems for social housing. Anna Heringer and Nripal Adhikary talk about the slow democratisation of earth construction and the differences of practising in Nepal, Germany and Ghana.

This issue also features profiles of the 15 finalists of the 2024 AR Emerging awards, whose work tackles the numerous crises facing the profession and the planet. From careful strategies of repair to low-carbon materials research to the revival of ancient crafts, and from Cuba to Hungary to Taiwan, these practices face a similar 

Cover George Douglas

The AR Emerging awards are an opportunity for exchange across geographies and contexts – the architects will meet each other and the panel of judges in London this month. The specially commissioned artwork by George Douglas that appears on this month’s cover captures this exchange, with each practice bringing their work to the table

Folio Carlo Lavatori

Douglas’s artwork was partly inspired by the Italian designer Enzo Mari’s eclectic collection of objects, which he used as paperweights

Conversation

Negotiating the aid paradigm

Sixten Rahlff, John Lin and Joshua Bolchover

Conversation

Ecosystems of social housing

Christelle Avenier, Miguel Cornejo and Carles Oliver Barceló

Conversation

Building with earth

Anna Heringer and Nripal Adhikary

AR Emerging awards 2024

A Threshold

Reuben J Brown

Superposition

Oluwatobiloba Ajayi

Civil Architecture

Leela Keshav

NWLND Rogiers Vandeputte

Reuben J Brown

Déchelette Architecture

Leela Keshav

TYFA

Derin Fadina

Infraestudio

Oluwatobiloba Ajayi

Asif Khan Studio

Mir Jetha

Bajet Giramé

Oluwatobiloba Ajayi

New South

Derin Fadina

Paradigma Ariadné

Leela Keshav

Chen Donghua Architects

Mir Jetha

Material Cultures

Reuben J Brown

Atelier EGR

Mir Jetha

Shen Ting Tseng Architects

Derin Fadina

The last page

AR Emerging awards 2024 trophies by The New Raw