Napoleon once said that if he had enough metals he could conquer the world. Well the people over at the Venice Architectural Biennale have the same idea in mind...
10th International Architecture Exhibition

Official Awards

Teatro Malibran, Venice
November 8th 2006

The President of the Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia Davide Croff and the Director of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition Richard Burdett are glad to announce that, for the first time ever, the awarding ceremony will take place during the final part of the exhibition. This is one of the most important changes introduced on occasion of this 2006 edition, since in the past years the ceremony was held during the official opening. On November 8th, at the Malibran Theatre in Venice from 7 pm, 15 prizes and three mentions will be awarded in the presence of 500 international guests. Among them, the representatives of the participating countries, exhibitors and professional architects.

Whilst on September 10th, during the official opening to the public in the Giardini della Biennale, the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement was awarded by the Board of La Biennale di Venezia to Richard Rogers (Florence, 1933), tonight the international Jury of the 10th International Architecture Exhibition will award the following official Prizes: three Golden Lions for national pavilions, for cities and for urban projects and a Special Award for schools of architecture. The Juries in charge for Cities of Stone and City-Port will award new prizes: 7 Stone Lion Awards for the Venice section and Portus Architecture Award for the Palermo section. Moreover, the Jury of the Italian Pavilion will award three prizes to a young designer, a theorist and a critic.

Golden Lions and Special Awards
Cities. Architecture and society
The Jurors, Richard Sennett (President), Amyn Aga Khan, Antony Gormley, Zaha Hadid, will award the following prizes:
Golden Lion Award for cities
Golden Lion Award for national pavilions
Golden Lion Award for urban projects
Special Award for schools of architecture
The 10th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia addresses a great problem and a great opportunity. By 2008 the majority of the world’s people will live in cities. They will live, increasingly, in cities of enormous size, cities of five to thirty million people, cities on a scale never seen before in human history. In these cities, social problems of health, wealth and opportunity become extreme. How can architecture address this monumental event? How can the art of architecture serve society? These are the questions the Biennale explores, in contributions from cities and nations around the world.
The Awards celebrate those contributions, particularly in cities which are the most rapidly developing today. The Jury of the Biennale wishes to acknowledge new ideas for environmental planning, for housing, and for transport. We wish to celebrate the participation of people, of urban dwellers themselves, in creating an architecture for their own lives. We have awarded prizes to architects and planners who have enabled them to do so, by making buildings and plans which can be diffused, adopted, and adapt to the diversity of the world’s cities.
The Golden Lion Award for cities is awarded to Bogotá, Columbia. This city has in the last decades addressed the problems of social inclusion, education, housing and public space especially through innovations in transport. Bogotá has applied Mies van der Rohe’s dictum ‘less is more’ to the automobile: less cars means more civic space and civic resources for people. The city provides a model for streets which are pleasing to the eye as well as economically viable and socially inclusive. Bogotá is, in short, a beacon of hope for other cities, whether rich or poor.
The Golden Lion Award for national pavilions is awarded to Denmark (CO-EVOLUTION, Danish/Chinese collaboration on sustainable urban development in China). This pavilion shows us a country looking outward rather than inward, bringing its expertise to bear on the ecological problems faced by cities in China. The Danish pavilion does more than catalogue these ecological challenges; the Danish planners and architects propose concrete solutions to water and energy management through visual forms of aesthetic merit. And the Danes show what they themselves learned from their Chinese colleagues. We salute the creativity, intelligence, and generosity of the Danish pavilion.
The Golden Lion Award for urban projects is awarded to Javier Sanchez/ Higuera + Sanchez for the housing project “Brazil 44” in Mexico City. “Brazil 44” is a project small in scale but large in possibility. It shows how with simple meanings, housing of great aesthetic quality can be constructed for people with limited resources –housing to which the inhabitants themselves can contribute formal design ideas. “Brazil 44” is a project which invites adaptation and mutation rather than imitations, a project which brilliantly explores the DNA of the ordinary urban house. We celebrate it as an exemplary piece of social architecture.
The Special Award for schools of architecture is given to the I Facoltà di Architettura Politecnico di Torino, for a project on Bombay. We applaud the scholarly erudition and visual imagination of this collaborative effort of a student group in designing new housing for poor families.
In addition to these awards, the Biennale jury would like to single out three exhibitions for outstanding merit: the Japanese Pavilion designed by Terunobu Fujimori for the integrity of its forms and for the sheer pleasure it provides to the visitors; the Iceland Pavilion for an outstanding collaboration between the artist Őlafur Elíasson and the architectural office Henning Larsen; the Pavilion of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia curated by Minas Bakalčev and Mitko Hadži Pulja for the depth and poetry of its thinking about urban form, rendered simple by chalks words and images on a black board.

Lions of Stone
Cities of Stone
A section within the Sensi Contemporanei project
With the support of Regione Puglia
The Project South jurors are Matthew Bell, Claudio D’Amato Guerrieri, Gabriele Del Mese, Gulzar Haider, Paolo Marconi, Attilio Petruccioli and they made a unanimous decision to assign the seven Lions of Stone to the following projects: Bari, team leader arch. Adolfo Natalini; Crotone, team leader arch. Carlo Moccia; Pantelleria, team leader arch. Gabriella Giuntoli; Bari, team leader arch. Guido Canella; Bari, team leader arch. Antonio Riondino; Bari, team leader arch. Vitangelo Ardito; Pantelleria, team leader arch. Marino Narpozzi.
The jury believes that all of the awarded projects demonstrate an intellectual response to the two important problems that are afflicting the Mediterranean city: the capacity to think of the city as an organic whole and the capacity for stone to give material identity to the architecture of the Mediterranean according to the logic of its construction. The awarded projects have afforded the most convincing responses with respect to a strong group of thirty-five projects selected for the exhibition.
The jury was unable to assign any awards for the site in Siracusa due to a lack of unanimity among the jurors.

The jury hopes that all of the winning designs are able to contribute to improving the formulations and rules of future design competitions for the four sites in Bari, Crotone, Siracusa, and Pantelleria, based on the close integration between architecture and the city, and offering as well insight into the diverse characteristics and local traditions of each place.


Portus Architecture Award
City – Port
A section within the Sensi Contemporanei project
with the support of the Regione Siciliana
The Portus Architecture Award jurors are Richard Burdett (President), Josep Acebillo, Massimo Pica Ciamarra, Luigi Scrima, Vittorio Camerini, Aldo Bonomi and the selected project is “Il parco della Blanda” of the Regione Basilicata.
Project area: Maratea, Piana di Castrocucco (Potenza)
Project team: Gustavo Matassa, with Vincenzo De Biase, Silvia Marano, Rosa Nave
A strong design of the landscape that connects the historical elements of the area, urban roots and “marine” gardens, in a complex earth-water system, characterized by lacustrine, marine and fluvial shapes. This project represents several ideas which are different from the territorial one, everyday life and meeting spaces.

Manfredo Tafuri Prize, Giancarlo De Carlo Prize, Ernesto Nathan Rogers Prize (sculptures by Luigi Ontani)
Italian Pavilion
The judging Board of the Italian Pavilion, composed of Franco Purini (President), Pio Baldi, Richard Burdett, Claudia Clemente, Margherita Petranzan, Livio Sacchi, Nicola Marzot will award the following prizes:
Manfredo Tafuri Prize to Vittorio Gregotti for the high theoretic contribution to a precise and creative analysis of modern tradition.
Giancarlo De Carlo Prize to Andrea Stipa for his ability in combining a concrete and experimental research on urban territory with an intense and visionary approach.
Furthermore, due to the complexity of the Italian architecture scene and to the inauguration of the new Italian Pavilion, the Jury has felt it was necessary to include a new acknowledgment devoted to a critic with strong communicating skills; the role of communicator is indeed increasingly important among the contemporary debate.
Ernesto Nathan Rogers Prize to Luca Molinari for his talent in interpreting the theories on contemporaneity, combining an innovative and strong synthesis with the new horizons of communication


The 10th International Architecture Exhibition has the support of the main partners Risanamento S.p.A., Inarcassa, Italcementi and of partners illycaffè, Targetti, Aci .





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