Swiss Architectural Award 2018: Award Ceremony and Exhibition Opening

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Institutional Communication Service

8 November 2018

The Award ceremony for the Swiss Architectural Award 2018 will be held on November 15, 2018 at 7pm in the auditorium of Teatro dell'Architettura at USI, Mendrisio campus. The winner of the Award is the Spanish architect Elisa Valero. The ceremony will accompany the opening of the exhibition, which represents the outcome of the sixth edition of the international Architectural Award. Curated by Nicola Navone it shows the works by 32 candidates from 19 different countries, and will be open to the public until December 23, 2018.

The ceremony will feature Boas Erez (Rector of Università della Svizzera italiana), Charles Kleiber (Chairman of the Swiss Architectural Foundation), Riccardo Blumer (Dean of the Academy of Architecture, Università della Svizzera italiana), Mario Botta (Jury President, Swiss Architectural Award 2018), Nicola Navone (Award Secretary), and Elisa Valero (Winner of the Swiss Architectural Award 2018).

Promoted by Swiss Architectural Foundation, in collaboration with Università della Svizzera italiana - Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio and the support of Fondazione Teatro dell’architettura and the Foundation for the Lugano Faculties of Università della Svizzera italiana, the Swiss Architectural Award seeks to promote a kind of architecture that pays attention to contemporary ethical, esthetical and ecological questions and that allows for public debate. As tradition has it, the exhibition will be accompanied by a monograph published by Mendrisio Academy Press and Silvana Editoriale, both in Italian and English.

The winner Elisa Valero
Born in Ciudad Real (Spain) in 1971, Elisa Valero Ramos graduated from the ETSA (Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura) Valladolid in 1996. She completed her PhD at the ETSA Granada in 2000 and won a scholarship from the Real Academia de España in Rome in 2003. She is the author of five monographies, has worked as reviewer and lecturer and was invited by numerous architecture schools in Europe and by the UNAM in Mexico City. She is currently Professor of Architectural Design at the ETSA Granada. This is how Elisa Valero describes her work: “At a moment in our culture when noise is enormously dense I have chosen an architecture that acts in silence, serenely and without drawing attention to itself. […] I am interested in living space, landscape, sustainability, precision and an economy of expressive resources. I am not interested in styles. I am more interested in books than in magazines, in consistency than in genius, coherency than artistic composition. And I understand originality as the rediscovery of the true meaning of things. I am interested in architecture rooted in the earth and in its own time. I accept the determinants of architecture as the rules of a very serious and enjoyable game and I try to play it in a coherent, rigorous way. While it is no longer stylish to speak of serving, I believe that an architect’s work is a quintessential service intended to make people’s lives more agreeable—a noble calling that seeks to make the world more beautiful and more human and to make society fairer. Architecture is no place for the nostalgic, it is a job for rebels”. 

Swiss Architectural Foundation
The Swiss Architectural Foundation, formerly known as BSI Architectural Foundation, is located in Lugano, at the Università della Svizzera italiana (USI). The foundation is active in the promotion of knowledge, training and research in the architectural field and aims at facilitating the collaboration between Università della Svizzera italiana – Academy of Architecture, Mendrisio and the Federal Institutes of Technology in Zurich (Architecture department D-ARCH, ETHZ) and Lausanne (Institut d’Architecture, EPFL). The Foundation provides for the creation of the Swiss Architectural Award: an international architecture award held every two years, which promotes an architecture that is attentive to the current ethical, aesthetic and environmental issues, thus encouraging public debate. 

For more information: www.swissarchitecturalaward.com

 

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