The Japanese Junya Ishigami is the winner of the fifth edition of the BSI Swiss Architectural Award: international architecture award sponsored by the BSI Architectural Foundation, with the support of the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio - University of Italian Switzerland and in cooperation with the Archive of the Modern of Mendrisio.
The award will be bestowed on the architect on September 22 at the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio (Switzerland), during a ceremony that will also mark the opening of the exhibition of the works submitted by the candidates, which will remain open until October 23.
The jury unanimously bestowed the 2016 BSI Swiss Architectural Award, selecting the winner among 28 candidates from 17 countries, for the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop (Kanagawa, Japan, 2004-2008), for the intervention at the Japanese Pavilion during the XI International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale (2008) and for the “House with plants” built in the suburbs of Tokyo for a young just-married couple (2010-2012).
According to the Jury, “the Junya Ishigami buildings create spaces of great beauty and serenity, that impose themselves with an unusual iconic power”, while offering also concrete answers to specific functional needs. The three works presented by Junya Ishigami are in particular characterized by “an innovative structural research but without redundant heroism, leading to an architecture of delicate refinement” and “a fruitful relationship with the vegetal element, always interpreted and declined in different ways”: from the building as a metaphor of a forest, in the case of the Kanagawa Institute of Technology Workshop, to the complete integration of the vegetation of the “House with plants”.
The jury of the fifth edition was chaired by Mario Botta (Switzerland) and included Jean-Louis Cohen (France), Marc Collomb (Switzerland - Director of the Academy of Architecture of Mendrisio), Bruno Reichlin (Switzerland) and José María Sánchez García (Spain).
The candidates have been nominated by a committee of advisors including Solano Benitez (Paraguay), Ole Bouman (Netherlands), Gonçalo Byrne (Portugal), Luis Fernandez Galiano (Spain), Sean Godsell (Australia), Bijoy Jain (India), Diébédo Francis Kéré (Burkina Faso / Germany), Shelley McNamara (Ireland), Valerio Olgiati (Switzerland), Smiljan Radić (Chile), Li Xiaodong (China) and the Pritzker Toyo Ito prizes (Japan) and Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Brazil).
