On Thursday, 12 June, the award ceremony for the 2025 Awards for the Building Arts and the Richard H. Driehaus Architecture Competition took place. These prizes recognize, respectively, the leading master artisans in the building crafts in Spain and the teams of architects awarded for their design proposals for each of the three municipalities selected in the competition.
The Richard H. Driehaus Architecture Competition is an international competition aimed at promoting an approach to architecture and urbanism that preserves, updates, and continues the forms, materials, and character of each place. It seeks to contribute to the creation of more beautiful, coherent, sustainable, and socially inclusive urban environments.
In this edition, the three selected sites were: Baltanás (Palencia), Irurita (Baztán Valley, Navarre), and La Fresneda (Teruel). Architects of various nationalities submitted architectural and urban design proposals for these locations.
The jury awarded the first prize, endowed with €12,000, to the proposal Identidad Estereotómica, submitted for Baltanás by Carlos Vallecillos Moya, Javier Navarro Mateos, and Guillermo Soria Alonso. Two honourable mentions, each with an award of €2,000, were also granted. These went to the projects Al Cotarro, by Ramón Andrada González-Parrado and Alfonso Zavala Cendra, and Los Corros del Cerrato, by the Franco-Spanish studio Patio b, formed by Blanca Aguilar and Benoît Souli.
In the case of Irurita, the first prize (€12,000) was awarded to the proposal Ni Arrai!, developed by the team of Javier Manén, Enric Mas, and Tomás Masó. Two honourable mentions — each endowed with €2,000 — were also granted: one to ¿Preparado para jugar?, by Ramón Preciado Jiménez and Miriam Larumbe Vinuesa, and another to Ventana abierta, by the team of Luis Felipe Pérez Villanueva, María del Carmen Crespo Pérez, and Laura de la Mata Morales.
In the case of La Fresneda, the first prize, also endowed with €12,000, was awarded to the project La Fresneda: Restoration of the Hillside, developed by Polish architects Oskar Alaburda, Oskar Pawłowski, and their collaborator Mateusz Chołuj. Two honourable mentions, each with an award of €2,000, were also granted: one to Fraxinus Excelsior, by Víctor Guimerá Millán and María del Pilar Rama Lara, and another to The Town on the Hill, by Nefeli Eforakopoulou and Michael Cradock.
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Text and imagery: Traditional Building Cultures Foundation