Taiyuan Museum of Art by Preston Scott Cohen

At the core of the museum’s design is a desire to harness and respond to modern technologies for the control of both artificial and natural light. The building’s curving, interwoven, and overlapping form creates ample opportunities for exploring the relationship of light and shade, and the architects employ multiple strategies—skylights, overhangs, and enclosed spaces—to choreograph the interplay. In so doing, they generate a form that flies in the face of the conventions of museum design and promises to redefine the visitor experience. “I think it’s going to engage a larger audience with architecture,” said juror Stan Allen.

Preston Scott Cohen—principal of his eponymous 10-person Cambridge, Mass., firm—created five wings for the project that are intermingled like the strands of a knot, allowing visitors to either follow a curated path or move seamlessly back and forth between the galleries. The building’s dynamic footprint creates vignettes so that a visitor in one gallery can look into another and into a small exterior green space simultaneously, without detracting from the experience of the art. “It’s trying to create new audiences, and new possibilities for new types of space,” said juror Sarah Dunn. “It has a certain publicness to it that makes it more interesting.”

The knotlike plan drew widespread praise from the judges. “The museum is clearly a wonderful piece of architecture,” Diane Hoskins said. “‘Can it be done?’ is the question. But I think it’s a fantastic project.”

Two piers forming the entrance to Copenhagen Harbor.  A pair of towers with more than 600,000 combined square feet of office space, civic areas, and a suspension bridge providing a public circulation path 200 feet above the harbor.

John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design By Office dA, Boston—

The building that houses the university’s architecture school sits on a corner site at the edge of campus, but it doesn’t engage with the streetscape effectively. Office dA (with architect of record Adamson Associates Architects) solved this problem with a skin of glass panels that reorients the entry sequence to the corner of two major streets, giving the building more prominence on both. At the entry point, the skin lifts to reveal the original building, and a combined stairway and ramp that snakes to the original main entrance. The double-skin system has insulated glass units that are engineered to optimize thermal performance.

Behind the new façade is an addition to the existing five-story building that adds another two stories of studio and library space. “It maximizes the density by building up. It’s a good solution,” juror Stan Allen said. Skylights installed in a green roof let ample daylight into the core, and a series of double-height flexible spaces are added onto and retrofitted into the original building. Usable for critiques and lectures and as lounges, these spaces also provide staircases, allowing for increased social interaction between staff and students, creating a greater sense of community than the existing building allows.

Matrix Gateway Complex by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture,

A 3-million-square-foot enclosed cube with urban infrastructure supporting residential, commercial, hospitality, and cultural uses

It seemed until recently that Dubai was going to continue forever its quest to build taller, faster, better buildings. But the Matrix Gateway Complex, by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, while certainly no small project, seems to take a different tack. “I appreciate the sort of restraint of this, the notion of making a kind of interior world that might have potential for a new kind of experience. It’s not simply about making some sort of icon on the skyline,” said juror Stan Allen. The massive 180-meter (590-foot) cube is built on an 18-meter (59-foot) supergrid, with steel frame structures clustered around, and hung from, five vertical cores. Accessible via a roadway that passes through the center of the building, a helipad, and a boat dock, the cube has a hotel with conference facilities, retail and office space, residences, a museum, a school, and a prayer hall—all of the major elements of a small city.

The semi-transparent skin that covers the structure is embedded with shading screens and solar panels, which reduce heat gain while generating some electricity for the complex. Additionally, the condensate from the humidity in the air will be collected and converted into drinking water. The water from the adjacent Persian Gulf will help cool the complex, as will interior waterfalls and breezes flowing through the skin. Juror John Peterson appreciated the architects’ approach and summed it up as, “ ‘We can do anything we want, so why not create something holistically?’ ”

Designed for a 100-foot-square plot,near a major highway in an industrial neighborhood in Portland, Or., is this 2,000-seat theater designed to hold rock concerts. The small footprint requires a vertical organization, and the stage and audience spaces are fronted by a series of ramps that provide circulation and informal gathering spaces.  Filling a void in Portland’s thriving music scene for a venue bigger than a club and smaller than an arena—a need that was all too obvious to the client, one of the area’s largest music promoters

BGBX is designed for a 34,435 vacant lot on an industrial strip in Winnipeg, Canada. The surrounding neighborhoods are residential. The development is twenty-four units of housing, flexible commercial space, and covered parking arranged around a central bioswale courtyard, with public decks connected by circulation bridges.  To create a sense of community in an inhospitable environment, 5468796 Architecture turned to an unlikely source of inspiration: the big box store. Calling upon their experience with projects ranging in scale from private residences to airport hotels, this 12-person Winnipeg-based firm began the design process for BGBX with a simple volume that filled the site. From there, the team carved out pathways and a central courtyard, resulting in six discrete, but irregularly shaped, housing blocks. Contained within them are 24 residential units ranging in size from 660 to 1,195 square feet. While some jurors expressed concern about the scheme’s inward focus and wondered if the architects missed an opportunity by turning the building’s back on the neighborhood with anonymous corrugated metal cladding, juror John Peterson was taken with the approach. “I think it’s pretty provocative,” he said.  The courtyard is a public green space, accessible not only to residents but also to the surrounding community. A lush bioswale is accented with decks, a gazebo, and bridges to encourage open use of the park—the only one in the industrial neighborhood. The façades of the housing volumes facing the courtyard are clad in concrete board panels that are hand-painted with pixelated images of trees. This effect intensifies and blends with the summer foliage and provides a warm contrast against the bleak winter snowfall. “I like it,” said juror James Richärd, “and I almost wish the core had actually gotten even more playful.

Museum of Image and Sound / Diller Scofidio + Renfro

A narrow infill site on the Roberto Burle Marx–designed promenade fronting Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro was used for the six-story museum building houses exhibition space, administrative areas, and workshops, as well as a restaurant, piano bar, auditorium, and rooftop movie theater designed for a Brazilian contemporary arts and education nonprofit organization.

The façade and building massing are defined by a series of ramps that climb up from street level. This extends the beachfront promenade into a sort of vertical boulevard that serves a functional as well as programmatic purpose: The exterior ramps allow patrons to access amenities such as the restaurant and rooftop theater after the museum galleries have closed. This impressed juror Sarah Dunn, who said, “The level of ambition here is very high.”

The building skin features a choreographed progression of expanses of glazing and small apertures. Carefully arranged to curate the view from inside the building, these windows showcase views of the sky, water, beach, and street—four defining elements of the area. Aiding in this view strategy is the fact that the building’s core is located at the western edge, allowing the bulk of the building facing the beach to be open to varied glazing.

The interior is organized around central voids. Ramps and stairs connect split-level exhibition spaces and a projection gallery. The intermingling of these display spaces with retail and entertainment areas creates a vibrant atmosphere. Which is fitting, because, as juror Stan Allen put it, “If there’s a place for exuberant architecture, it’s the beach in Rio

River Center Library / Trahan Architects

What If the Pages of a Book Opened Into a Building?

A five-story public library with perimeter ramp circulation around central stacks was designed for the Baton Rouge River Center, an urban area bridging cultural and civic districts, adjacent to a green boulevard.  The folded form of the library building is derived from sheets of paper, connected at the corners and then lifted to make a lattice. “It is interesting,” juror Diane Hoskins said. “It’s a play with the geometry.” But local firm Trahan Architects took this beyond a simple formal gesture, creating gently sloped stairs along the perimeter that provide circulation through, and determine the program of, the building.

The stacks are located at the center of the building on concrete slabs, and the edges of those slabs are finished and exposed to the visitors as they walk up the stairs to reach the next level. Each floor is accessible via both the stairs and a central elevator. “I think it’s pretty impressive,” juror John Peterson said. “For me, the challenge with libraries is the relationship between how one moves through the stacks and deals with access. This solution is pretty nice.”

A void between the perimeter ramps and the concrete slabs that support the stacks allows visitors to see multiple levels of the library at once, an effect that intrigued juror Adele Chatfield-Taylor. “I like the way it is porous going vertically,” she said. “That’s very attractive in a library, because it makes you curious about the rest, the way it gets used.”