Brick Award 2024, Vienna

In June, Director Eleanor Trenfield co-hosted the prestigious Brick Award by Wienerberger along with Kristofer Robert Adelaide.

There were numerous innovative projects that it must have been challenging for the jury (Christelle Avenier, Christine Conix, Wojciech Malecki, Boonserm Premthada, Ingrid van der Heijden) to decide on the winners.

Grand Prize Winner and Sharing Public Spaces category winner was International Rugby Experience in Limerick, Ireland by NIALL MCLAUGHLIN ARCHITECTS LTD, described as a cathedral of sport. The building was designed with great attention to materials, using nearly half a million bricks, mixed to achieve the ap­propriate colour tone to match the neighbourhood. Even the building dimensions were tailored to the brick size to minimise waste.

The Feeling at Home category winner was the Intermediate House, built around an existing mango tree in a long and narrow plot between two structures, from air-dried compressed earth blocks compressed on site, significantly reducing CO2 emissions and with innovative heat-mitigation methods fit for Paraguay’s climate by Equipo de Arquitectura.

Electricity Supply Board HQ, Dublin was the Working Together category winner, designed by Grafton Architects & O’Mahony Pike Architects. It’s a city block with a brick crust and a soft landscaped interior. In place of the 18th century Georgian brick houses that have vanished, the architects combined craft and traditional technology with contemporary technology, repairing the fabric of the city. The team, studying Georgian architecture, translated 18th century ideas of landscape and buildings, weaving landscape through the city block. The result is interlaced courtyards and gardens and terraces right up to the roof level, providing natural light and ventilation within the large block.

Types of Spaces, a temporary public pavilion by architects HANGHAR and Palma Arch, was the winner of the Building Outside the Box category. It was a sequence of six strictly geometric spatial structures, made entirely of thermal bricks, that fits between the walls of adjacent houses and to provide a special experience away from the busy streets within the framework of Concéntrico, a festival taking place in Logroño, Spain to encourage people to consciously experience the city. Visitors immersed themselves in a world that sharpens perception: of space, light, air and permeability, of progress and rest, of the static uniformity of brick walls. In contrast to the perfectly constructed walls was the floor, covered in brick chips, contributing to the variety of sensory sensations: walking requires attention and slowness.