Winners of 2024 EU Mies Awards Announced

The two winners were announced by Normunds Popens, Deputy Director-General, Directorate-General Education, Youth, Sport and Culture of the European Commission, and Fréderic Druot, president of the 2024 EUmies Award jury, at an event held on the evening of April 25 at CIVA in Brussels. The announcement is a culmination of the two-year-long process that began with a list of 362 works in 38 European countries nominated for what is considered the highest honor for architecture in the European Union.

In addition to Druot, the 2024 jury included Martin Braathen, Pippo Ciorra, Tinatin Gurgenidze, Adriana Krnáčová, Sala Makumbundu, and Hrvoje Njiric. According to a statement from the European Commission and Fundació Mies van der Rohe on today's announcement, the jury “engaged in extensive deliberation to determine the winner among [the five finalists]” for the Architecture Award that were announced in February, with “intense exchanges of opinions and different stances.” 

Although the jury considered that three of the finalists, including the winner, “promote mindset changes in the current social, ecological and political context,” and the other two “touch upon significant aspects concerning heritage, landscape and public space,” they saw the finalists and winning works as “an inseparable whole to better understand the paths that contemporary architecture takes to confront sustainability, social equity, technological advancements, health and well-being, cultural preservation, resilience and adaptation, economic viability and globalization within an ethical practice and both ideologically and pragmatically.”

Details on the two winners of the 2024 EUmies Award are below.

Studierendenhaus TU Braunschweig (Study Pavilion on the campus of the Technical University of Braunschweig) is a two-story building that provides student work spaces in a flexible environment. Inspired by Cedric Price's Fun Palace and Yona Friedman Spatial City, the open, indeterminate ground floor and upper floor consisting of a series of platforms and bridges allow students to change the layout of the spaces as needed. Built out of slender steel beams and columns, wooden ribbed decks, and glass facades — all completely free of glue — the modular building is fully demountable, following the principle of “design for disassembly” and the spirit of “circular construction.”

As is customary with the EUmies Award, the jury visited each of the finalists to determine the winner; they found the Study Pavilion to be a “welcoming and playful environment for study, collaboration and community gathering.” The building is being rewarded “for its ability to challenge the constraints and imagery of sustainability” and for the way “it has taken a clear architectural idea, scrutinized it and pushed it to the limit.” More than being a building, the jury statement continues, “it could be understood as a versatile system, merging technological inventions with a flexible and reusable principle.”

The 2024 EUmies Award is just the latest prize for the Study Pavilion at TU Braunschweig and its architects, Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke, both of whom opened their respective studios in Berlin in 2015 — making them the youngest winners of the EUmies Award (and young enough, it seems, for the Emerging Award!) — the same year they won the competition for the project. In 2023, the year it was completed, the building was awarded the biennial Deutscher Architektur­preis (German Architecture Prize), which is considered the most important award for architects in Germany, and earlier this year the building won the 2024 DAM Preis, the annual prize for architecture in Germany that is given out by Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) with JUNG. Importantly, the EUmies Award takes the praise beyond Germany's borders and elevates the importance of the ideas implemented in the versatile, fully demountable building.

Biblioteca Gabriel García Márquez (Gabriel García Márquez Library) is a district library that was built in 2022 in Barcelona's working-class Sant Martí neighborhood. The corner building follows the chamfers that are prevalent in the city's Eixample, but it reinterprets this tradition via a generous cantilever over the main entrance. Inside, a full-height atrium, triangular in plan, connects the library's five floors. Architects Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano of SUMA Arquitectura conceptualized the building like books — stacked, opened, perforated, and oriented in different directions — given shape through a hybrid of laminated and cross-laminated timber and steel. Wherever possible, the wood structure was left exposed.

The jury appreciated how the library “acts at the scale of the city, contributing to the transformation of the neighborhood by opening up as a new exterior and interior public space.” On their visit to the building, the jury discovered “a rich sequence of monumental and domestic spaces that welcome neighbors and citizens, providing them with comfortable atmospheres and community engagement.” With meticulous attention to detail, the jury statement concludes, “the authors have thoroughly for learning, teamwork, examined and pushed the library program to its fullest potential.”

Like the Study Pavilion at TU Braunschweig, the EUmies Award is not the first prize levied at the Gabriel García Márquez Library. It was named the Public Library of the Year in 2023 by the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions). Curiously, Elena Orte and Guillermo Sevillano founded SUMA Arquitectura in Madrid in 2005 — ten years before Gustav Düsing and Max Hacke established their Berlin studios — but also received the commission for the Gabriel García Márquez Library in 2015.