BIG, Mecanoo, John McAslan among Special Awardees in 2017 Civic Trust Awards

Established in 1959, the UK-based Civic Trust Awards recognize projects worldwide for notable aesthetics, inclusive design, sustainability, and positive community impact. During the 2017 ceremony at The Guildhall Winchester last Friday in Winchester, a total of 45 projects (out of 247 applications) received awards.

In this year's edition, five projects won Special Awards, 17 projects received Awards, and 31 projects received a Commendation. The winning projects include BIG's 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, the Mecanoo-designed HOME cultural arts center in Manchester, WilkinsonEyre's renovation of the Weston Library at the University of Oxford, and Grimshaw's Suffolk Energy-from-Waste Facility in Suffolk, to name a few.

Here's a glimpse of the Special Award winners below.

Community Impact & Engagement Special Award: Greenwich Housing | Greenwich, Greater London
Architect: Bell Phillips Architects

Project excerpt: “Greenwich Housing is a new public housing project for elderly and disabled people, comprising 22 single-story houses built across six sites in the Royal Borough of Greenwich. The scheme marries public housing with exceptional design standards, providing much-needed homes for social rent suitable for people over 60 on small redundant sites. The project has assisted the borough in accommodating population growth and demographic change in an unobtrusive and cost-effective way...”

Sacred Heart Cathedral of Kericho | Not in UK/ROI, Kenya
Architect: John McAslan & Partners

Project excerpt: “Completed in November 2015, Kericho Cathedral is located in Kenya, approximately 250 km south-west of Nairobi. The Cathedral’s design creates a unique and sacred place for a congregation of 1,500 seated celebrants participating in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Mass under one giant unifying roof. The striking inclined roof and its ascending interior volume – over 1,375 square metres in size - is the key organising concept behind the design. The aspiration was to create a structure that integrated seamlessly, in both aesthetic and functional terms, with its landscape setting...The ascending vaulted volume contained under a vast roof fuses African and ecclesiastically historic references.”

Selwyn Goldsmith Award for Universal Design: HOME | Manchester, North West
Architect: Mecanoo

Project excerpt: “As Manchester’s center for international contemporary art, theatre and film, HOME is a cultural catalyst for the developments around First Street. It houses two theatres, five top-of-the-range cinemas, a flexible gallery space, bars on each floor, a restaurant, and a wide central stairwell that acts as an informal social space. The interior concept and layout is that of an urban living room, instilling a sense of warmth and intimacy.”

The Bombay Sapphire Distillery and Visitor Centre | Basingstoke & Deane, South East
Architect: GWP Architecture

Project excerpt: “The Bombay Sapphire Distillery and Visitor Centre is a unique and iconic part new build, part refurbishment development. The scheme creates new premises, within an existing Victorian mill complex in rural Hampshire for the production, storage and distribution of the globally established Bombay Sapphire Gin. The site itself is a Conservation Area and includes three Grade II listed buildings among 26 existing structures as well as the SSSI protected River Test. The retrofitted buildings are perfectly complimented by some stunning new build structures, most notably two unique glasshouses...”

Pro Tem Special Award: Serpentine Pavilion 2016 | City of London, Greater London
Architect: BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group

Project excerpt: “For the 2016 Serpentine Pavilion, BIG decided to work with one of the most basic elements of architecture: the brick wall. Rather than clay bricks or stone blocks – the wall is erected from pultruded fiberglass frames stacked on top of each other. The unzipping of the wall turns the line into a surface, transforming the wall into a space. The resulting design is a series of stacked Lay Light boxes which slide horizontally over cruciform aluminium profiles to create an interior cavity within the wall...At the end of the term in its current location, the Pavilion is set to travel to several cities in Asia and America.”

See the Award winners here, and the Commendation winners here.

Photos courtesy of 2017 Civic Trust Awards.