This time the list was made up of four "cultural institutions" and an institution close to them in spirit. These are the Danish Maritime Museum in Helsingor by the BIG bureau, the Art Museum of Ravensburg in southern Germany, the LRO workshop, the Student Center. From the Swee Hock of the London School of Economics, designed by Irish architects O'Donnell + Tuomey, the Philharmonic Hall in the Polish city of Szczecin by the Barcelona bureau Barozzi / Veiga, as well as the exquisite "recreational" Tuscan Antinori winery from Archea Associati.
This is a surprisingly uniform short-list - both in terms of the general "spiritual and aesthetic" function, and in the emphasized materiality of each of the structures, and in their dialogue with the environment rich in semantics. All buildings, except for the winery, are located in a historical environment - albeit one that has come down to us in varying degrees of preservation, and the winery is in the Chianti hills, the landscape of which requires no less respect.
This choice of the jury seems unexpected against the background of the constantly growing authority - and popularity - of "social" architects and initiatives, which often leads to the fact that the public, environmental and technical "merits" of the project are first evaluated, and only then the quality of architecture.
but
The Mies van der Rohe Prize, awarded every two years to a European architect for construction within the EU, recognizes - among other things - precisely the quality of buildings, which the creators of the award understand as “the universal values of typical buildings, independent of their program: rather, the essence of things, than their formal values. Therefore, such a set of finalists is quite consistent, though not the spirit of the times, but the objectives of the award.
We will know the names of the 2015 Prize Winner and the Winner of the Honorable Mention for Young Architects on 8 May.
