Winners of the 2020 AR House Awards: transformed Buffalo garage earns top prize

Six residential projects from across the globe have just been recognized in Architectural Review's AR House Awards competition. 

While the top prize this year went to an adaptive-reuse conversion by emerging practice Davidson Rafailidis in Buffalo, New York, the jury also awarded two Highly Commended projects in Australia and Mexico as well as three more Commended buildings in Japan and Belgium.

This year's jury included three previous AR House finalists: co-founder of Collectif Encore Anna Chavepayre, British architect Lisa Shell, and Dutch architect Ard de Vries.

Winner: Big Space, Little Space in Buffalo, NY by Davidson Rafailidis

Project summary: "Davidson Rafailidis transformed a 1920s garage into a small house in Buffalo, NY. The house, named Big Space, Little Space, reinterprets the pre-existing living spaces to create an adaptable space that changes with the seasons and the needs of the users. The ‘Little Space’ consists of an enclosed, insulated area within the garage, containing a kitchen and bathroom as well as a sleeping and living space. The room overlaps with the ‘Big Spaces’: the workshop that inhabits the larger portion of the building, and in summer months expanding into the garden and the roof deck."

Jury comments: "[It] achieves a level of delightful intricacy without willfulness. The project is built from a clear narrative of opposites - a play between the intense and laconic, which is rigorous from idea through to detail. [...] The house’s capacity to adapt to the seasons, the changing light and the flexible devices, means it is a very big small house."

Highly Commended: Couldrey House in Australia by Peter Besley and HNNA

Project summary: "In the foothills of Mount Coot-tha, a monolithic brick house which rises from the subterranean rock with a heavy thermal mass."

Jury comments: "The luscious oozing mortar of the masonry facades is delightful, as is the simple interior palette of concrete, 'white' and timber.’ [...] The house is perfectly adapted to 'the ancient and enigmatic landscape,' heavy from the outside and surprisingly light when you enter the living room situated in the canopy of the trees."

See Couldrey House featured in detail here on Archinect.

Highly Commended: Casa Avándaro in Mexico by Manuel Cervantes Estudio

Project summary: "A long timber house that unfurls living spaces across the landscape, branching from a simple colonnaded spine."

Jury comment: "You feel the house can be silent and calm and filed with life. [...] It is a modest design in which light and air determine the quality of the interior and the exterior through the rhythm of the wooden construction."

Commended: White Hut in Japan, by ADO

Project summary: "A polyhedric suburban house that opens a generous hand to the street while preserving the privacy of its inhabitants."

Jury comment: "In a complex urban context the geometry formulated the quality of the interior space."

Commended: House TP in Belgium by dmvA 

Project summary: "A floating greenhouse captures light on top of a house as it attempts to integrate urban farming with domesticity."

Jury comment: "House TP is curious and complex despite being a tiny low budget renovation project."

Commended: Four Leaves in Japan by Kentaro Ishida Architects Studio

Project summary: "An organic roof shape integrates this rural house with its natural surroundings and creates a dynamic living space below"

Jury comment: "The complex play of the four roof planes transforms an otherwise unexceptional house into something very special, both internally and externally."