João Luís Carrilho da Graça was born in Portugal in 1952, he has been an architect since 1977.
Awards and honours: International Association of Art Critics Award (1992), Secil Architecture Award, Portugal (1994), Valmor Award, Portugal (1998, 2008, 2010), FAD Award, Spain (1999), Order of Merit of the Portuguese Republic (1999), International Biennial of Light Award - Luzboa (2004), Pessoa Award, Portugal (2008), Piranesi Award - Prix de Rome (2010), Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic - Chevalier (2010), Medal of the Academy of Architecture, Paris (2012) International Award for Sacred Architecture - Frate - Sole (2012), Ibero-American Biennial Award for Architecture and Urban Planning (2012), International Fellowship of the Royal Institute of British Architects (2015), Honorary Member of the Order of Architects, Portugal (2015), Buenos Aires International Biennial Award for Architecture (2018), Leon Battista Alberti Award of the Politecnico di Milano, Mantova Campus, Italy (2018), arpaFil Award, Guadalajara, Mexico (2018).
Selected for the Mies Van der Rohe European Architecture Award on several occasions.
He participated in the official representation of Portugal at the 12th, 13th and 16th Venice Architecture Biennale and in the central exhibition of the 15th Biennial.
Professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon between 1977 and 1992 and subsequently between 2014 and 2019; at the Autonomous University of Lisboa between 2001 and 2010; at Évora University between 2005 and 2013; at Navarra University between 2005 and 2015; at Cornell University, New York, in 2015. Currently, he is a professor at the Unesco Leon Chair
Battista Alberti of the Mantova Campus of the Politecnico di Milano.
Doctor Honoris Causa by the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon.
Anupama Kundoo is an internationally recognized architect whose experimental work on materials and impact on the environment is internationally recognized. She is one of the most outstanding exponents of a new generation of architects from peripheral countries concerned with solutions that improve the lives of the majority and not of minorities.
She founded her studio in 1990 in Auroville, India. Her work has focused since its inception on researching materials and experimenting in order to produce architecture with low environmental impact and appropriate to the socio-economic context. An innovative approach to architecture, which is based on intensive research and experimentation in the development of building technologies and the integration of energy and water efficiency solutions into prototype buildings that are environmentally and socio-economically friendly.
31-35 rue Saint-Ambroise, Roger Anger, Paris © Aurovici Sercomanens
In an unprecedented urbanisation context, contemporary architecture requires compact floors that limit the impact of the city on the environment. This has generated a profusion of high-rise buildings for residential use. Given the risk of abandoning the human scale in this high-density dwellings, where the monotonous repetition of apartments stacked one on top of the other without a vertebral criterion is usually accompanied by industrialised techniques such as curtain walls and homogeneous monolithic skins, this contest explores the facade as a key element of innovation, embodying the new face of an anthropocentric and integrating urbanism that is sustainable from an environmental, social and economic point of view.
The facade of a building is a fundamental architectural element that establishes a transition between the inside and the outside, between the privacy of the individual and the collective space of the city, between manipulable environmental conditions and a weather that changes throughout the seasons whose incidence can be controlled by means of projections or solar protection devices. But the "skin" of a building could also be of thicker volume, a transitional living space in the style of the old balconies and galleries, but updated. Its materiality could incorporate new aspects, such as the growing concern about the effect of buildings on the environment, waste generation or energy-saving materials. It could also be a living element capable of evolving as the transformation of the city demands. And the porosity necessary so that the organism that lives inside it can exchange air with the outside. The facades of the future should take advantage of their potential to capture solar energy or rainwater, to make the contact with nature easier, by means of urban gardens. The repetition of residential units in high-rise buildings, which could lead to monotony and the dilution of the individual's identity in the collective, presents us with a new challenge that must be faced with tools that anticipate the future of the residential facade. These tools could be the artistic and intellectual expression based on formal conditions, or the interiorisation of aspects relating to human perception and scale. This future, which is reflected in the face of the built habitat, is in tune with the emerging social values: the concern for social issues, the human scale and the individual expression in relation to identity, the image of the individual and the place he occupies in society, or the material and technological decisions that underpin the spatial definitions of the gaps in architecture.
An innovative facade for this type of high-rise collective housing is required. A facade that balances all these given complex conditioning factors in order to lead to a synthetic solution that can encompass all these aspects. The facade is conceived as the limit between the built and the unbuilt, as a glimpse of the future city. The proposal will describe an area of four heights and four rooms by height, taken from a wider scheme designed by the participant. Considerations of the size and height of the indoor areas, as well as the weather conditions, will be up to the participants, but should be reflected in the proposal.
