On November 7th the Venetian office TAMassociati was awarded the Curry Stone Design Prize, the international award that selects the architectural solutions which are the most innovative and have the biggest impact on improving the global quality of life. For the first time an Italian architecture office has been awarded one of the major international awards in this category, along with the Hunnarshala (Bhuj, India) and Proximity Designs (Yangon, Myanmar) offices.
Salam centre for cardiac research
Tamassociati architects was chosen by an international jury, made up of John Cary, N'Goné Fall, Rahul Mehrotra, Damon Rich, and Clifford Curry, for African projects commissioned by the NGO Emergency, known for its great attention to issues of sustainability and the universal right to healthcare. These include the Salam centre for cardiac surgery in Khartoum, which won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2013 in September and the Paediatric centre Port Sudan (Giancarlo Ius Gold Medal 2013).
Paediatric centre Port Sudan
The collective has managed to build state-of-the-art hospitals, respecting the criteria of environmental sustainability, involving the local workforce, employing local materials and restoring dignity to patients accommodated within the structures.
Tam/Emergency Curry Stone Prize Winner
The members of Tamassociati explain: “Once again, the Curry Stone Design Prize bears witness and interprets a growing desire to start thinking of a different, shared and shareable future at a global level. Only then can it go back to being a collective moment that brings a choral us back to the centre of the discussion where architecture can be a means and not the end.”
“(...) Because architecture is a required action, it creates the pre-conditions to our existence, a definitive act that will change the history and the people who live in that part of the world that it will occupy forever. The effort to conquest rights, in itself huge, must follow the will to cultivate them, let them take root and grow so that they become indefinite. We founded the office 15 years ago – conclude Tamassociati – basing ourselves on this vision and giving us this mission, trying to give our best so that all our architecture, as well as being a physical place, is and will remain a symbol of these values, becoming a common good.”
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