CIVA hosts the announcement of the EUmies Awards 2024, the most prestigious prize for European architecture. The European space is composed of an emulsion of natural and cultural, vernacular and canonical, traditional and artificial elements. Contemporary architecture must assume this ambiguity and project it towards the future. The purpose of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture / Mies van der Rohe Awards is to detect and highlight those works whose innovative character acts as an orientation or even a manifesto.
After selecting 7 outstanding works and visiting each of them, it is now the moment to announce the Architecture winner and the Emerging winner. On the occasion of the announcement Frédéric Druot, Nikolaus Hirsch, Normunds Popens and Anna Ramos will discuss what the awarded works represent in the current social, environmental, political and architectural context.
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Frédéric Druot, president of the 2024 jury, is an architect, researcher and artist. In 1991, he founded Frédéric Druot Architecture (FDA) in Paris, based on thought and research of non-limited scales and a multidisciplinary dialogue between all those involved. Design, music, fashion, urban design, architecture and landscape open the path of investigation and reflection on the idea of design. The problems of housing and urban planning are representative of the main activity of the studio with a special concern regarding existing situations. He was the winner of the EUmies Awards 2019 with Grand Parc Bordeaux, together with Lacaton & Vassal and Cristophe Hutin, which followed the research publication Plus + Paris.
Nikolaus Hirsch is the Artistic Director of CIVA in Brussels, and previously was the Dean of Städelschule and director of Portikus Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. His architectural work includes the Dresden Synagogue (shortlisted for the Mies van der Rohe Award in 2003), Hinzert Document Center, Cybermohalla Hub in New-Delhi, and “Do We Dream Under The Same Sky“ at Art Basel and LUMA in Arles. Hirsch curated “Folly” for the Gwangju Biennale, “Wohnungsfrage” at HKW Berlin and the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2021. He is the author of “On Boundaries” and “Cybermohalla Hub”, editor of the Critical Spatial Practice series at Sternberg Press and founder of e-flux architecture.
Normunds Popens, Deputy Director General European Commission - Directorate General for Education, Youth, Sport and Culture. He was previously the Deputy Director General for Implementation in the Directorate General for Regional and Urban Policy of the European Commission and in charge of overseeing the implementation of structural and cohesion fund programmes in EU member states and candidate countries. Before joining the European Commission in 2011, he occupied several posts in the Latvian diplomatic services such as the Permanent Representative of Latvia to the EU.
Anna Ramos, director of Fundació Mies van der Rohe, is an architect, associate professor of Technology in Architecture at ETSAB-UPC, guest professor at MSA - FH Münster, external member of the scientific committee of the Bauhaus Earth Fellowship Program, of the board of directors of ESA Paris and honorary president of the Piran Days of Architecture. Previously she had been deputy director of International Relations of the ETSAB-UPC, president of AJAC (Association of Young Architects of Catalonia), and director of her own architecture studio in Barcelona.
The EUmies Awards are organised by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe with Creative Europe, the European Union's program to support the cultural and creative sectors. They benefit from the participation of the Architects’ Council of Europe (ACE), the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) along with World Architects as strategic partner, the partnership with Jung, Jansen and Regent Lighting and the support of USM modular furniture, Alma and European Cultural Center.
The event takes place in the context of Belgium’s presidency of the Council of the European Union and the meeting of European Architectural Directors-General.
