A’ Architecture, Building & Structure Design Award Winners

The A’ Design Awards & Competition 2022-2023 is currently open for submissions! The A’ Design Award & Competition has a philanthropic goal to advance society by pushing the frontiers of science, design, creativity, and technology forward by creating incentives for innovators to come up with better ideas. It is the world’s largest annual juried design competition that honors the best designers, architects, and design-oriented companies worldwide. Every year projects that focus on innovation, technology, design, and creativity are awarded to push them further for success. This year winners will be announced on May 2023, and we will make sure to share our favorites on ArchEyes.

There are over a hundred categories to choose from, including specialized design awards such as the Good Industrial Design Award, the Good Product Design Award, Good Communication Design Award, Good Service Design Award, Good Fashion Design Award Disposable, and Single-Use Product Design Competition.

In today’s post, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite designs from the Architecture, Building & Structure Category from previous years to help kick-start your submission!

Haus Am See Residential House by Carlos Zwick Architekten BDA

• Designers: Carlos Zwick and Visualizer: Mejo C. Joy
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “The architectural concept of the house pays tribute to the historical roots of the place. Without compromise, it subordinates itself to them without touching their essence. The structure floats above the terraces, respecting their space and form.”

Huanghesong Theatre Cultural Venues by Xuelin Wu

• Designers: Xuelin Wu, Hai Lin and Gao Li
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Platinum A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “Architecture is the integration of ecology and culture, and its shape is like the vortex of the Yellow River. Continue its concept in interior design, excavate the ritual and music culture of Central Plains culture, and deduce ancient music in space through modern means.”

Rice Wine Cultural Center by Wei Zhang and Kesuo Wu – gad

• Designers: Wei Zhang and Kesuo Wu – gad
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “The design makes full use of the landscape advantages of the site; the three-story building volume is stacked and retreated back from south to north, forming a number of roof terraces overlooking the Dashu River, creating more possibilities for the later use of the restaurant. Drawing on the strong functional adaptability of traditional wooden frame architecture and Domino architecture system, the scheme decided to take 4.8mx4.8mx4.8m cubic square as the basic module of the building.”

Bamboo Pavilion Toilet Renovation by Manuel Lap Yan Lam – The Volks Design

• Designers: Manuel Lap Yan Lam and Design Team: Scarlett Li
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “Façade of the Bamboo Pavilion is a re-interpretation of bamboo scaffolding that the Macau industry has used over the years. Hundreds of white aluminum tubes are arranged in a staggered manner surrounding the structure forming a translucent shell that blends in with nature. The bathroom space is turned inside out. Light rays shine through the façade to the interior; daylight and ventilation are enhanced by preserving the skylights and by tailor-made slanted windows that integrated openings to enhance cross ventilation.”

Monopitched Roof Residence by Masato Sekiya

• Designers: Masato Sekiya and Shizuko Kuroda, Structural Designer: Shigeyuki Nakata
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “The main precept of traditional Japanese house design is creating continuity between the outside and interior spaces. Simultaneously, the emphasis is on harmony with nature, creating an all-season, energy-efficient house that blends with the environment. This house was designed for rural Nara Prefecture, Japan. This is a modern take on traditional design, materials, and methods, and the house is arranged around a central traditional Japanese garden, with a link and flow between each room.”

Double Skin House by Nobuhito Mori

• Designers: Nobuhito Mori
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “There is a traditional Japanese partition, the shoji, which is a way of ensuring light and privacy. The shoji consists of a thin wooden frame covered with translucent paper, which softens the incoming light and blurs the interior. Inspired by the shoji, the designer has created a modern light filter that is resistant to wind and rain and can also be used outside.”

Kujdane Holiday House by Yaser Rashid Shomali and Yasin Rashid Shomali

• Designer: Yaser Rashid Shomali and Yasin Rashid Shomali
• Winner Category: 2021 – 2022, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “The design team expresses influence from its natural context to curate the contemporary cabin dwelling, a reinterpretation of the traditional A-frame typology. the wooden material palette is expressed with cool-toned interior elements, paired with a facade of full-height glazing to fit the dwelling’s curving profile.”

Guangming Public Service Platform by Zhubo Design

• Designers: Feng Guochuan, Zhong Qiao, Liu Xiaoying, Executive managers: Qu Yu, Zhang Biqin, Xiong Guilin and Designers: Xu Longjie, Gong Xiaowen, Deng Hua, Zhang Meisong, Hou Lianjian, Bao Shaobin, Qu Zhenhua, Liang Fuji, Xie Bo, Lv Fang
• Winner Category: Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Category, 2020 – 2021.
• Inspiration: Taishi Chair-like layout (three sides enclosed, south side open) is very common among Chinese government buildings and was also requested in the project’s design brief. The designer intended to break the conservative Taishi Chair-like spatial pattern to bring a new image and inject vitality into the government architecture.

House in Repino Residential by Shamsudin Kerimov

• Designers: Shamsudin Kerimov and Ekaterina Kudinova
• Winner Category: Architecture, Building and Structure Design Category, 2020 – 2021.
• Inspiration: The main source of inspiration was the unique natural environment of the region. For the project, the natural materials were chosen: stone characteristic to the local environment, wood, and metal. All of them will change in time for architecture to fuse with the natural environment.

Muh Shoou Xixi Hotel by Shawn Cheung – GOA

• Designers: Zhang Xiaoxiao, Landscape Design: Z+T Studio
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Muh Shoou Xixi originally means the last fruit left by farmers on the tree with the special intention of sharing it with animals in nature to pray for the harvest of the coming year. That’s just where the name of Muh Shoou Xixi comes from. The architect attempts to present the natural beauty of Xixi Wetland – coldness, quietness, uniqueness, wildness, and seclusion – to visitors through the design and evoke the resonance between human and the primitive nature through the architecture.

House for Parents Residence by Masakatsu Matsuyama

• Designer: Masakatsu Matsuyama
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: As a traditional daily custom in this island, people gather and stay under the shadow of large trees. We aimed to create architecture that celebrates the culture of the region and leads to re-emerge the spirit of traditional life on the island. The space under the large roof, which is supported by thin steel columns, provides a shady and cool, comfortable interior that suite the severe climate on the southern island.

Dream House Island Rural Renewal by Tianqi Guan

• Designer: Tianqi Guan
• Winner Category: 2018 – 2019, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: “This is a project for the TV program to convey a notion that makes people more aware of the relationship between environment and structures, encouraging them to care about the living environment and maximize spatial delight and spirit. People often concern grand narrative-themed buildings and usually turn a blind eye to many houses that are humble but still relevant to daily life. Moreover, we pay too much attention to how good a building looks on the outside while ignoring what lies inside.” – Tianqi Guan

The Black House Housing by Buero Wagner

• Designers: Fabian A. Wagner, Sophia Eun Joo Pfeiffer, Maxi Wagner
• Winner Category: 2018 – 2019, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The Black House is located next to a forest not far from Ammersee, one of Germany’s largest lakes one hour southwest of Munich, Bavaria. Encompassing an 80 square meter plot, “The Black House” directly adjoins to a larger family home next door, yet is distinguished as an independent building. The residence is characterized by its carbonized wood facade, with rooms of different heights stacked together to create a variety of spatial situations.

White Mountain by Kris Lin

• Designers: Kris Lin and Anda Yang
• Winner Category: Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Category, 2020 – 2021.
• Inspiration: The designer was inspired by the shape of the rolling hills and created the surficial landscape that extends down to the visual surface of the building. It connects the surficial and underground space. The project base is surrounded by mountains, with natural landscape resources such as Zijin Mountain and Hongshan Forest Zoo.

ShuiFa-White Marble in the Wilderness Property Exhibition Centre by Qun Wen

• Designer: Qun Wen, Gen Li, Shixin Gao, Jiarui Li, Suqing Yan, Liuqing Liu, Ye Wang, Dan Zhu, Jing Du
• Winner Category: Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Category, 2020 – 2021.
• Inspiration: Inspired by Wang Wei’s verse from Mountain Dwelling in Autumn: “Rain passes in the pristine mountain, refreshing autumn evening. Moon shines among the pine; clear spring flows on stones.”

The Peach Garden Hostel Homestay by Chao Zhou

• Designers: Zhou Chao, Deng Kechao, Zhang Hang, and Qin Siyuan
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: In sharp contrast between the old and the new, the heavy and the light, the historical building is reborn.

Courtyard NO.1 Sales Office by Qun Wen

• Designers: Qun Wen, Mingwang Huo, Gen Li, Jing Du, Chen Liu, Kaiqi Yang, Xiaodan Chang, Zhuojun Niu
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: In the digital age, many actions are performed in the virtual world nowadays. Therefore, the building objects are designed to float in an unstable state, welcoming the surrounding audiences with an open, dynamic posture.

House On Pipes Weekend Getaway

• Designer: Nagendra R and Raghunandan G
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The linearity, sleek supports, and wide canopies of the trees within the site inspired us to begin with the concepts of having similar linear supports elevating the built space and minimal contact to the land. A lightly structured design paved its way, purely based on previously proposed landscape space. In doing so, both the built and unbuilt are celebrated together as a whole.

Mountain House in Mist by Lin Chen

• Designer: Chen Lin and Liu Dongying
• Winner Category: Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Category, 2020 – 2021.
• Inspiration: The book house is located in an ancient village in Wuyi and was developed by a local tourism real estate company as a part of the development and construction. Before the development, only a few elderly residents live in this empty village. It was hoped that this book house could change the situation by bringing more visitors to it.

Yongning Station Urban Mini Complex by Yijia Hu

• Designers: Hu Yijia and Design Team: Zhang Juxin, Chen Yining，Zhou Yuechen, Ye Tong
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: In memory, the Yongning park before the repair is a forbidden land, the river is dangerous, and it is full of mudflat. When I was a child, I would catch crabs by the river with my little friends after school. However, I was always wary of the danger of sunset ebb tide. Suddenly there was a parental reprimand, the moment when the afterglow disappears into the earth plane…The uncertainty of these moments is fixed into an impression word in the deep memory – fleeting scenery.

House in Shiraiwa Residence by Tsukasa Okada – 2id Architects

• Designer: Tsukasa Okada – 2id Architects
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The house is located in Shiraiwa, the north of Hamamatsu city in Japan. It is surrounded by a mandarin plantation halfway up the mountain. With an extraordinary view and rich nature, its environment allows the design of a building by the concept of distance between inhabitation and nature. Two contradictory senses have formed the house. One is a sense of openness led by its location looking down the valley from the mountain’s slope. The other is a sense of security led by the other fact of its location surrounded by mountains as if it protects the house.

Garden House by Christos Pavlou

• Designer: Christos Pavlou
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: When the landscape becomes an inspiration, there are no boundaries between inside and outside. In contrast with many urban houses built to isolate themselves from the rest of the neighborhood erecting fences, this proposal aimed to form a physical continuation of the public green area that exists on its longer boundary. The design seeks to establish a unified relationship between the neighborhood, the private garden, and the public area. This idea helps to upgrade the quality of the urban fabric.

Cloud of Luster Wedding Chapel

• Designer: Tetsuya Matsumoto
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Platinum A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The modern wedding ceremonies in Japan inspired the design for the Cloud of Luster. These are all about the lightness, the brightness, and the smooth transition towards a happy future family life. The lines needed to be naturally curvy, and the space required to be open to receive as much light as possible. The columns needed to feel official as the ceremony is taking place and yet be as smooth and glamorous to spread the moment’s happiness.

Phoenix Tree Garden Tea Space by Qingfan Zhang

• Designer: Qingfan Zhang and Bo Zhang
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Some elements come from the reference to Suzhou classical gardens, such as the small arch bridge, borrowed from the static bridge in the net master garden, the stone paving on the ground borrowed from the linear stone paving of the bathing gull small garden. Designers designed and directed the stack of the red rock mountains. Several tea rooms with different views and feelings were made in less than 200 square meters.

Hill Wind Hotel and Resort by Huafang Wang

• Designer: Huafang Wang, Weizhong Yue, and Shuai Huang
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Platinum A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: According to the regional characteristics, the designer combines the local culture and historical context in conception. Under the dominant atmosphere of modernism, the designer uses the language of design to create a dialogue with space, and then interprets the visual, tactile, and spiritual resonance, reproducing the Anji area humanistic landscape pattern of “The cicada noise highlights the silence of the forest, and birdsong sets off the depth of the mountain.”

Faculty Architecture Education school by Patrick Schweitzer S&AA

• Designer: SetAA, Associate architect : EAACON, Construction : EGIS, Enterprise : CATIC and Landscape architect : Acte 2 Paysage
  
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The building uses two simple materials commonly found in the region: stone for the exterior envelope; and self-colored concrete for the interior. The building has small outward-facing windows and large inward-facing windows protected from the sun by roof overhangs. The upper section of the pyramids is truncated to bring in natural light and optimize ventilation.

Samaranch Memorial Museum by Archiland

• Designer: Archiland, HAO design（New York）, COWI, Kragh & Berglund and TADI
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The original intention is to build a green building that commemorates Mr. Samaranch and inherits the Olympic spirit. It was transformed through the five Olympic rings: the main building presents two intersecting circles, and the other three circles transform into a sunken courtyard. The “8” shape commemorates the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. The “S” shape stands for “Samaranch”; the third is that the shape symbolizes Infinity and eternity.

Interpretation Centre of Romanesque Exhibition Centre by spaceworkers

• Designers: Henrique Marques, Rui Dinis, Rui Rodrigues, Rui Miguel, Sérgio Rocha
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Based on Romanesque architecture concepts in Portugal, the building aims to be a transitional element between the present and the distant past. In a simple way, the volumetric proposed contains the principles of unity within diversity, appearing under the form of several volumes with different heights and dimensions, demonstrating the diversity that Romanesque buildings have left us. Therefore, each volume of ceilings reinterprets one of the roof types used in Romanesque architecture.

BaseCamp Lyngby Student Housing by Lars Gitz Architects

• Designers: Lars Gitz Architects,  Jon Clausen, Nevena Milosevic, and Kim Clausen
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The context inspired the concept and the organic form. This part of the city has a very natural and green character that the building is in harmony with. The idea was to bring students closer to nature and motivate them to interact with it. The project had to satisfy the low-cost sustainability demand. A trapezoid repeatable shaped module that rotates differently within the same radius was invented, creating the round organic shaped structure. The structure is uninterruptedly running through the site, creating a walking path in nature on top of the building.

House for Parents Residence by Masakatsu Matsuyama

• Designer: Masakatsu Matsuyama
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: As a traditional daily custom on this island, people gather and stay under large trees’ shadows. We aimed to create architecture that celebrates the region’s culture and re-emerges the spirit of traditional life on the island. The space under the large roof, supported by thin steel columns, provides a shady and cool, comfortable interior that suits the southern island’s severe climate.

Studio Atelier11 Office by Hyunmo Park

• Designer: Park Hyunmo, Park Geunhyo, and Kim Dohyung
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Studio Atelier11 has the system with the line and grids that urban development has accomplished recently to the north and the organic system. The natural patterns are preserved to the south and located in the contact point that different city plans have.

Santos House by Fernando Abelleyro

• Designer: Fernando Abelleyro and P.Coles
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The need to promote a typological construction that enhances versatility and the constructive possibility that wood offers; in our country, it was never widely accepted as a reliable and noble construction material. It was necessary to generate a project which expresses the potential of this wonderful material. The inspiration was given by the context itself, given the search to articulate a fluid relationship between the interior and the exterior.

Chinese Quadrangle Hotel by Zhang ZhaoYong

• Designer: Zhang Zhaoyong and Zhan Shuaihong
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Silver A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: Although the folk custom and classical rules are antiquated, the classic can still go on in today’s landscape.” This is a line in the Chinese Quadrangle Courtyard by Qi Qin. This design is a Chinese quadrangle courtyard. Although this quadrangle courtyard looks inconspicuous from the outside, you will find a world all its own as you walk in, with every brick and tile emitting a strong and unsophisticated atmosphere of life. With a deep grasp of Chinese traditional culture, space scale, and human settlement concept, the designer integrates modernity and tradition into a beautiful picture.

Warm Transparency Clinic by Yoshiaki Tanaka

• Designer: Yoshiaki Tanaka
• Winner Category: 2019 – 2020, Gold A’ Architecture, Building, and Structure Design Award Winner
• Inspiration: The client requested a clinic where we can feel the warmth of wood. TSC architects tried to achieve a clinic with “Warm transparency” by using plenty of wood material for interior and exterior material. And TSC architects set the large wood eaves extended from inside of the building to a tangent between the town that has a traffic-laden street. The large wood receives the patients and generates a space where the patients can feel security even outside the building, being a symbol of the town.

Registration to A’ Design Award & Competition 2022-2023 is open now.
Results will be announced to the public on May, 2023.