The Architecture Book of the Year Awards programme was launched in 2023 by The Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects, the Temple Bar Trust and the World Architecture Festival. The awards highlight impactful books about architecture or architects, awarding prizes across a number of fields.
Awards
Building Monograph category
Eva Branscome won the Building Monograph category with Hans Hollein’s Masterpiece: Art, Architecture and the City (Lund Humphries), which tells the story of the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach, West Germany, from its design and construction to its opening in 1982. Hollein was awarded the 1985 Pritzker Prize, and his building became an architectural landmark. Eva’s book explores his conceptual approach, his collaboration with director Johannes Cladders and artist Joseph Beuys, and the connections between art, architecture, finance, corporate power and capital investment.
Judges Catherine Croft, Niall McLaughlin and Robert Wilson said,
"We highly recommend Eva Branscome’s book. It draws on in-depth research, including interviews with the architect. It is well presented and illustrated. It explores the relationship between architecture and conceptual art in a convincing way. (It is hard now to recall the huge impact this piece of art-architecture had on museology and architecture as a whole – but it certainly did.)”
Technical category
FABRICATE 2024: Creating Resourceful Futures (UCL Press), edited by Phil Ayres, Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen, Bob Sheil and Marilena Skavara was commended. The publication is the fifth volume in the FABRICATE series, gathering work by international engineers, architects, technologists and students, and documenting disruptive approaches that reconsider how fabrication can be leveraged to address our collective and entangled challenges of resource scarcity, climate emergency and burgeoning demand.
The judges commented,
"A very useful and important book for architects and students about physical research and prototype experimentation into new building and material techniques. The book is beautifully designed and illustrated and it is good at informing readers and especially architectural students about possible building futures.”
Eva Branscome is Professor of Architecture and Cultural Heritage at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She teaches on Architecture BSc (ARB/RIBA Part 1) and Architectural History MA, and is also a PhD supervisor.
Bob Sheil is Professor of Architecture and Design through Production, and the co-founder, co-editor and co-chair of FABRICATE.