February 10, 2025
Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize 2025 Finalists Annouced
Five architecture firms have been named finalists for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP), a coveted biennial award created by the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology in 2013.
MCHAP Director Dirk Denison and 2025 MCHAP Jury Chair Maurice Cox announced the five finalists at an event at Mexico City’s Anahuacalli Museum on February 5th. The 2025 Americas Prize honors outstanding architecture and landscape architecture completed in North, Central, or South America between June 2022 and December 2023.
The jury includes Cox, former commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development; Sofia von Ellrichsha usen, founding partner of Pezo von Ellrichshausen; Mauricio Rocha, founder, Taller | Mauricio Rocha, and the 2023 MCHAP winner; Giovanna Borasi, director and chief curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; and Gregg Pasquarelli, founding principal of SHoP Architects.
The authors of the winning project, to be announced at a symposium and gala on May 5, at S. R. Crown Hall, will be recognized with the MCHAP Award, the MCHAP Chair in IIT’s College of Architecture, and $50,000 to fund research and a publication.
Centro de Investigación Mar de Cortés
Tatiana Bilbao ESTUDIO,
Mazatlán, Mexico
The gran acuario Mazatlán is activating an underutilized park and lagoon of a seaside resort town. A massive series of walls conceptualized as a discovered “ruin” are inhabited by birds, fish, plants, and water. This arrangement sets up a series of beautifully composed mise-en-scene, one-point perspective corridors, replete with dramatic oculi allowing light to frame the water displays.
A non-prescriptive circulation pattern allows the visitor to wander and discover, easily moving between moody indoor spaces, glowing tanks of water holding the aquatic species, and outdoor gardens open to the sky. The mechanical complexity of such a program is deftly concealed to allow for a fluid and effortless experience of the exhibition space. A building that is driven by the spectacle of a captured nature, it amazes and delights the public as it connects to the surrounding park landscape and paves the way for an elevated public architecture for the city as a whole.
adamo-faiden
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Despite the synthetic decisions and sharp material palette, this subtraction within a preexisting house is in no way reductive. All the opposite—the generous volume of air adds to a wide range of readings of the new piece: a serene and ventilated waiting room, stimulating the interaction of all its users, a passage to the hidden plaza that draws the sidewalk into the backyard, a temple-like city lantern radiating at night.
It is the ultimate political project: making the city one small piece at a time, on a tight plot, recycling its structure, taking a normal program, and elevating it to improve everyday life for humans and nonhumans alike.
Colectivo C733
Bacalar, Mexico
A mangrove, a square, and a promenade; a strong idea that transcends its materiality. Rarely does a line that’s materialized into a passerelle do so many things at once. This linear topography, slightly tilted to give each of its corners a different height, and hence experience, manages to combine a healthy ecosystem with an open-air museum, public space for swimming and walking while offering the users a new opportunity and perspective on recreation and learning. Paradoxically, this protective perimeter preserves nature while also allowing thousands of people to enjoy a highly fragile yet mainly privatized shoreline, heightening consciousness of this unique endangered ecosystem and becoming part of the signature identity of Bacalar.
5468796 Architecture
Winnipeg, Canada
A plot that had no future: the project builds a contemporary new way of living within the memory of industrial archaeology. A series of smart strategies allow designers to maximize the identity of the Pumphouse, the new residential use, views, and private and shared spaces in this complex urban plot. The abandoned pump house seems to extend its precise and rigorous material language beyond its original enclosure.
The small domestic interiors expand into shared spaces and circulation that animate the block in all directions. These units are elevated making the use of alleys and a series of pockets of communal activities accessible.
Eskew Dumez Ripple, Marlon Blackwell Architects, and Andropogon Associates
Bentonville, Arkansas, United States
The powerful interpretation of a new academic pedagogical mission of youth learning while doing is matched by an equally powerful campus.
Steeped in the rural culture of its place—the barn, the porch, and the long and low farm buildings of Arkansas are assembled to create a new type of public space keeping in scale with the surrounding fabric. The design of five academic buildings loosely scattered within a garden with different characters successfully creates an environment of constant indoor/outdoor porosity.
Students and the general public are able to gather and co-mingle under outward-facing porches, covered passageways that shelter outdoor activities and framed views, encouraging the movement through spaces with a strong community orientation. The comfort of containment that this campus masterfully composed allows for natural flows of people, wildlife, and weather.